


The One Where Chloe Preggo'd Her Eggo

by cheeky_geek_m0nkey



Category: Pitch Perfect (Movies)
Genre: Baby Times, F/F
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-07-15
Updated: 2016-01-04
Packaged: 2018-04-09 10:51:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 30
Words: 37,086
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4345712
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cheeky_geek_m0nkey/pseuds/cheeky_geek_m0nkey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>All the fics that came from you fluffernutters requesting pregnant!Beca</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Can you write a Bechloe minific based on this "Beca was probably one of the most adorable pregnant women to ever walk the planet. Even Aubrey thought so." — sent by anonymous

Beca Mitchell was probably one of the most adorable pregnant women to ever walk the planet. Even Aubrey thought so, though neither women would ever admit to such a Beale-ian sentiment. 

But it was pretty impossible to deny, and as time wore on, Chloe felt like she was creating a powerpoint of proof to back up the claim. And Beca seemed all too willing to supply evidence. 

“Seems like all the challenges you faced on the vertical front hasn’t really translated to horizontal growth,” Aubrey muttered when she met them at the baggage claim, crossing her arms and tutting. 

Beca shook her head, the grin growing on her face despite spitting the word “bitch” out harshly. They stood there for a few seconds, Chloe’s eyes jumping nervously between the two of them until finally Beca broke the tension with an uncharacteristic squeal. Throwing her arms up, she stood on her tiptoes to hug Aubrey, rocking her side to side. “Missed ya, Pukey Posen,” she muttered, to which Aubrey responded with a pinch to her elbow, pulling away. 

Chloe grabbed Aubrey’s suitcase during the exchange, already having her mini-reunion with the former Bellas captain while Beca had trotted off to the bathroom during their wait ( “It’s a thing that happens now,” Chloe said under her breath, grinning while still squinching her nose. She said it like it was the kind of secret a seven year old kept buried under their treehouse, digging it up only to impress friends. “Like, a lot.”). She laughed at the way Beca swatted at Aubrey’s hand when the blonde went to feel her stomach, dodging the touch barely and breathing a “dude, no” in her typical shocked tone. But even more endearing was the way Beca bent over slightly, picking up Aubrey’s carry-on and refusing to let anyone else help despite the absolute waddle she was moving at. 

“Does she do that a lot?” Aubrey asked later that night between sips of wine. Chloe followed Aubrey’s gaze to find Beca, scooting a kitchen stool towards the pantry shelves so she could use it to reach the saltines. She grinned out of the side of her mouth, breathing out a small chuckle as she shook her head. 

“Becs, careful with that precious cargo, yeah?” she shouted over to the other woman before quickly turning back to Aubrey and leaning in conspiratorially, “It’s been eight months, and I don’t think she realizes she’s pregnant, Bree.” 

She was  _very clearly_ pregnant, though, if her protruding belly wasn’t enough of an indication. And while that didn’t lessen her stone-hard resolve to maintain independence in all things, it _did_ soften that bit of her that was always resistant to emotions. Or, rather, resistant to tears. 

“It’s just…like…that’s _not_ the right house for them, yunno?” she said later that night, wiping at the corners of her eyes. Her bare-feet were stretched over the armrest of the couch, and Chloe was running a thumb up and down her arm. The redhead hummed, pressing her forehead on the top of Beca’s head. “It’s, like, all they want to do is start a family. And without an open floor plan, they’re just gonna….” her voice got progressively higher as she talked, until it cracked and she was a mess of sniffles. Aubrey, too surprised to laugh or mock or tease, was only capable of shifting her eyes to Chloe, who met her shocked stare with a raise of her eyebrows and a grin that was worth a million dollars. Whatever message that was sent between them ended with Chloe giving a knowing nod. 

“Hey, babe,” she whispered, brushing Beca’s hair out of her face, “Big day tomorrow, huh? Let’s get you to bed.” 

“Okay, I thought I was the miracle-worker, but it’s clear you’ve done the one thing I never could,” Aubrey mutters when Chloe shows her where the guest bathroom is and how to turn on the shower. “You broke that girl, you know.” 

“I know,” Chloe said proudly, running her hand under the water to make sure it was warm enough. She bit her lip, remembering the determination pressed over Beca’s face a week earlier, when she had yellow paint dotting her cheek and neck, but she huffed through it to finish the room. Chloe promised she’d finish up when she caught Beca painting (they agreed she wasn’t, by any means, allowed to be doing not only such a strenuous activity but to be doing one that involved such harmful fumes…but Beca was determined to shoulder at least _some_ of the “dad” duties), and she guided the girl into the room step by step with her hands over her eyes when it was completed. Beca cried then, too, but a different kind of tear - not the one driven by hormones and pulled out during an episode of House Hounters, but the one that made Beca’s eyes sparkle, because she couldn’t hold in what she was feeling any longer. Those tears, of course, quickly  _became_ the hormonal tears, as she glared at Chloe for smiling at her crying, and spat something akin to “I’m not fucking crying…the kid’s just, like, pressing really hard on my…entire body, you know”. 

To anyone looking in on the outside at the woman who started off as the human embodiment of a glare and now considered her favorite part of the day to be when Chloe drove the toy truck she stole from her brother up the wide curve of her stomach mindlessly and through a fit of giggles, they would think she was a different person altogether. The scared smiles and constant eye-rolls would always exist to prove that outside person wrong, but, more than that, Chloe just thought that the softness always lining Beca’s eyes was starting to fluff around her edges too. 

“I don’t exactly think I would try out your tactics,” Aubrey reasoned, throwing the towel on the rack and getting her shampoo out of the traveling case, “But I do say, well done.” 

“Thanks,” Chloe said, and even though it was a silly conversation, she couldn’t help but feel validated a little. 

“Now, Beca’s not the only mom-to-be being celebrated tomorrow, so out, out, out,” Aubrey clapped, shooing Chloe out of the bathroom with less sentimentality but a classic and familiar slap to the ass that made Chloe jump and shake her head before padding off to her room. 

“You shouldn’t have waited up for me,” Chloe said quietly when she saw Beca peeking out from behind her belly on the bed. Beca moved to sit up more, running her hands through her hair. Though her eyes were open, her face was muddled in the haze of unconsciousness, and Chloe recognized it all too well as the familiar and ever-present battle Beca had with sleepiness. 

“Damn kid doesn’t…” Beca paused to yawn, blinking impossibly slowly, “Let me sleep without you.” 

Chloe smiled, pressing a kiss to Beca’s forehead before humming and moving down to her lips. Her hands reached down to touch the round stomach, running over the wrinkles in the shirt Beca wore to smooth out where the seams struggled to stay intact. Beca’s hands were on her cheeks, holding her face to her own and humming through the kiss. When Chloe finally pulled away, she laughed at the blush on Beca’s cheeks. 

“I get you knocked up, and you’re still getting all hot and bothered,” Chloe chuckled, and Beca rolled her eyes in response. 

“Whatever, get in bed. I’m tired as fuck, and this asshole of yours only settles in for the night when it knows you’re around,” Beca said begrudgingly, though there was a twitch of sentimental genuineness to it. Chloe tutted, walking to the other side of the bed and scooting under the covers. 

“Are you trying to tell me that our baby is a cuddler?” Chloe said, bouncing her head from side to side as she bit back out smile. Beca only groaned, throwing her arms down to her side and carefully scooting herself back down to her pillow. The movement was slow, cautious, and it was almost strange to watch such a self-proclaimed independent woman struggle with shifting her body comfortably, but when she finally turned, facing Chloe with her stomach adding an uncomfortable amount of distance between them, she smiled sleepily. 

“Lo’ you, Chlo,” she murmured, closing her eyes. Chloe reached out, combing through Beca’s hair once. 

“Love you too, Becs and Co,” she said, moving her hand down to Beca’s stomach and keeping it there as she slipped into sleep far too easily. 

Yes, Beca was probably the most adorable pregnant woman to walk the planet. But in moments like this, she was the most beautiful one too. 


	2. The One With the Announcement

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> micific?!? - it's just a date, after all, just one in a long line of their dates, but tonight chloe feels jittery. jittery and beca is only rummaging around the closet in their spare room. but, yeah, chloe is jittery. — sent by anonymous

“Babe, what’re you looking for?” Chloe glanced away from the mirror for a second, leaning to peek into the doorway of the spare room. Beca was crouched on the ground, her hands moving frantically over the empty shoeboxes they’d piled there ( “Having a closet full of shoeboxes seems necessary in absolutely zero ways” was Chloe’s near-constant chant about that room, but Beca always shrugged, responding with, “You never know when you need a shoebox. Or a plastic bag. Or duct tape. One day, when you’re fucked because you need that shit, you’ll thank me.”)

Beca groaned, allowing the crashing sound of cardboard to answer for her. Assuming that was all she’d hear on the matter, Chloe returned to trying to put her earring in. Her hand had been shaking, and the more she zoomed in on it, the more dramatic the tremor became. Which was odd, really. Because it was just a date. 

Earlier that day, between third and fourth period and halfway through a granola bar, Chloe’s phone lit up with a series of texts from Beca. 

_[The Woman, The Myth, The Legend (11:42am)]: Looking like a light evening, I hope?_

_[The Woman, The Myth, The Legend (11:43am)]: Cuz I was hoping to take this really hot teacher out tonight, but…_

_[The Woman, The Myth, The Legend (11:43am)]: I wanna make sure all the homework’s finished first._

_[Chloe (11:44am)]: Why do I feel like one of the boys put you up to this to get out of homework?_

_[The Woman, The Myth, The Legend (11:45am)]: Okay 1. Fifth grade boys and I didn’t get along well in fifth grade, so I doubt that’s different now and 2. Don’t ruin my sex-god texts with mentions of little boys PLEASE_

_[The Woman, The Myth, The Legend (11:47am)]: But seriously. Date tonight?_

_[The Woman, The Myth, The Legend (11:47am)]: We’re going somewhere fancy._

Dates were not unusual with them. Beca was a master baker but couldn’t come close to a stove without burning something, and Chloe liked to spend a few hours at school with the kids who had to wait for their parents – on occasion, Beca would join her, slouching in the front desk and making it look like her home. Chloe wondered when she acquired that ability, thinking back to the Beca who she met at Activities Fair - the Beca who didn’t even seem to be at home with herself let alone her environment. Now, she radiated comfort. Confidence. Chloe’s favorite afternoons were the ones where Beca visited, bringing along just enough food to share with whomever had stubbornly sat themselves in the corner while they waited for their grandma to pick them up. The smaller girl always got the kids to talk to her, willing them to play some sort of drawing game on the chalkboard that Chloe never understood. “It’s a game I played back in the day,” Beca explained after the first visit, “Ma was always working, so, I had to wait for her shift to end before I could hit the road.” 

So, they relied on the judgment of master chefs at Taco Bell and Subway for most of their meals, occasionally throwing something easy in the crock-pot to jolt their blood with a little ounce of nutrition. Thus, dates were not unusual with them. 

There was something about this one, though, that was. Chloe couldn’t put her finger on it (probably because said finger was jittering uncontrollably…as evidenced in her damn eyeliner), but she assumed it had something to do with the fact that Beca was doing the inviting this time. She was always the one to ask for a night in, willing to go out of her way to bring back take-out so as to avoid sitting in crowded restaurants. And though she was much more of a romantic than Chloe ever thought possible, white lap napkins and high heels were on Chloe’s end of the compromises they made when they decided to be together for the rest of their lives. 

So when she got home to find Beca already ready to go, her hair piled on top of her head in elaborate braids and a touch of gold underlying her typical jet black eyeliner, there was something that seemed different. And it wasn’t just the fact that Beca was wearing heels high enough to put her at Chloe’s eye-level. 

She heard a louder groan from the other room, nearly a growl. Moving to the doorway officially, her heels signaled her entrance, and Beca shot out to the front of the room immediately. Boxes were strewn over the floor and on the guest bed, and one strand of hair had come out of her up-do. Despite her inherent tininess, she thought she could block the scene from Chloe with her body. 

“Nope,” Beca said before Chloe could ask any questions. She herded her out the door, closing it decisively. “Nothing’s wrong. Now, are you ready? Yes? Great. Awesome. You look great.” 

She hardly threw a glance at Chloe, pulling her out the door by her hand. Chloe realized that Beca hadn’t looked her in the eyes all night, and she gripped the car handle harder. The car-ride was silent, as was the walk into the restaurant, and several times, Chloe had to look up to stop nervous tears from falling. She saw that Beca ordered the steak, asking for a side of mashed potatoes, green beans, and another bread basket. 

She overate when she was nervous. 

Which was adorable when they were at school, and she sleep-ate the week before finals causing the biggest war of “Those Were My Leftovers” that the Bellas had ever seen. It was adorable, too, in the years after college, when she rear-ended some “douche” on the turnpike while in Chloe’s car and bought a cookie cake to bring home - only to have eaten it all on the way. 

It was not so adorable now, though, when she took Chloe to the nicest restaurant in town, wore a  _dress_ and  _heels_ and spent a large part of Chloe’s prep time scouring through their closet of boxes. 

When the waiter left, Beca recognized that she needed to say something to break the silence. She opened with, “We worked on a new track today. Totall-” before being interrupted by Chloe’s nervousness. 

“What’s going on, Becs?” her voice was nearly cracked, and she hand both hands pressed onto the table. “First you plan a date, and take me here, and pretend like nothing’s happen but something is clearly happening and when people act like that it’s to propose but we eloped and we should’ve have fucking eloped because now you’re divorcing me, I know you’re divorcing me I–”

“Chlo!” Beca shot out, grasping Chloe’s hands, which were waving nervously around her head. She scooted her chair closer, taking a deep breath. “Chlo, chill.” After a beat of eying Chloe, she said, “Jesus.”

Chloe nodded, looking away with pursed lips to try and get a grasp on her mind, which was now running wildly out of control after she’d voiced her concerns. She breathed deeply for a moment, and then shot her gaze back at Beca, squinting her eyes. 

“You never clarified. You never…answered the question,” she said, anxiety rising in her stomach again. Beca saw it, and with a hand, she pressed down on the air, depleting it. 

“That’s kinda because,” Beca said slowly, letting go of Chloe’s hands and sipping her water casually. She had a grin on her face now, less nervous, less harried, and it put Chloe more at ease.  “I was concerned that you were going to go into cardiac arrest and I’d have to raise this baby on my own, which was, like,  _so_ the opposite of the deal.” 

Chloe rolled her eyes, slapping Beca on the arm and snorting. “You’re such a tease.” 

Beca bit her lip, shaking her head with her eyebrows raised. She reached to her purse - which was probably bought in the late ‘90′s, and still had her mom’s hospital ID in it (she needed _something_ to hold stuff, and she  _knew_  she left it in that spare room’s closet) - pulling out a thin and carefully folded piece of paper. She handed it to Chloe, noticing that the woman’s hands were still shaking. Which was fine, because her hands were ice cold. Instead of slipping the paper into the palm of her hand and them letting go, she clasped it between them, making a sandwich. The act still Chloe’s hands for a moment and warmed Beca’s up. 

“That’s not the best way to say thank you for letting your body be a receptacle to my genetic material for nine months, Chlo,” she said, turning their sandwich of hands and kissing Chloe’s knuckles. The redhead swallowed nervously, her brow furrowed in confusion. She was shaking her head slightly. 

“No,” she squeaked, her bottom lip trembling when she parted her lips, “No. No. That’s not…” 

Without her smile faltering, Beca nudged the paper in Chloe’s hand, pointing at it to tell the girl to open it. When she did, gray blotches of nonsense splotched the paper, and Chloe left out the world’s most broken, hopeful, disbelieving, “O-o-oh,” while throwing a hand to cover her mouth. 

“I slightly resent the fact that I can’t take you out to a nice dinner without you thinking I’m divorcing you, buttttt,” Beca continued easily, “We’ve got some time to fix that before that babysitter’s start a’knockin’ on our door.”

Chloe slapped her again, her eyes never leaving the sonogram. “You….?”

Beca met the Chloe of few words a select number of times. After their first kiss at Worlds, after she suggested eloping three months later on a road-trip from Barden to LA, and now. As she held the picture of their kid. 

“Please don’t slap the pregnant woman,” Beca said jokingly, receiving another slap, and then a whole round of them, including a squeal of “How. Could. You. Not. Tell. Me?!?” and “THIS IS NOT A JOKING MATTER BECA WIPE THAT GRIN OFF OF YOUR FACE”. Still, she finished with a kiss, one that interspersed with giggles, and both of their jitters bubbled away. 

It wasn’t really just a date. 


	3. The One Where Chloe's There the Whole Time

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hey, could you please write a little One shot were Beca is pregnant and chloes by her side the whole time also when the baby comes? — sent by anonymous

“I can’t fucking believe you’ve convinced me to do this,” Beca muttered, running her hand over her almost non-existent stomach as she analyzed her figure in the mirror. Despite her words, there was a carefulness to her stroke. 

Chloe laughed from behind her, sitting up from the bed into kneeling position to put her chin on the other woman’s shoulder. “ _Language_ ,” she critiqued in a whisper, pressing a kiss to Beca’s neck. 

“It doesn’t even have ears yet, dork,” Beca grinned, turning from the mirror to grab Chloe’s hand and press her forehead against the redhead’s. 

“Yes, but with your sailor mouth, I thought we’d start early.”

–

She was a tiny woman as it was, and as she examined her stomach in the mirror every night before bed, they hardly noticed the way her belly grew until Chloe heard grunts and groans coming from their room after her shower. 

“Becs,” she cautioned, through a hesitant knock to the door, “Is everything alright in there?”

They’d already had the conversation wherein Beca told her that she wasn’t allowed to hover. If they were using her body to house a tiny human, then she reserved the right to be as autonomous as she wanted to be, and Chloe simply had to trust that if anything was wrong, Beca would tell her. That didn’t help the panic that flood through Chloe’s chest every time Beca so much as sneezed. 

“Yeah,” Beca huffed out in a small, strangled breath, which was enough of a response to illicit total fear in Chloe. She stormed through the bedroom to find Beca doing some variation of the worm on the ground, slithering and twisting with her hand on the zipper of her jeans, her belly protruding from the waistline. “I told you I was fine.” 

“Beca,” Chloe tried her best to stifle her laughter, knowing that wouldn’t bode well for her, “Come on, come up.” She held her hands out to the other woman, wiggling her fingers until Beca huffed and grabbed them, putting her weight onto Chloe’s muscles and jumping up with surprising agility. 

“They’re my lucky pair,” Beca explained sheepishly, tugging at the zipper still. “And we’ve got the ultra-sound today. And I just wanted it to go well. But now these don’t fit anymore and I feel really dizzy and –” she hiccuped, which was how Chloe had realized she was crying. 

“Whoa, whoa, whoa there Mama B,” Chloe breathed, putting her hands on Beca’s shoulders. “Breathe, just breathe. Okay?”

Beca nodded, wiping her eyes and taking in a shuddering breath. 

“I love you,” Chloe said when she saw the mascara dripping from Beca’s eyes. And it was true. So unbelievably true. 

“I’ve ruined our baby’s life because my lucky jeans don’t fit,” Beca said incredulously, her brow furrowing, and Chloe giggled. 

“Considering you’re less concerned with your growing waistline than you are with the health of our child, I think we’re actually doing better than most moms,” Chloe offered, pressing a hand to Beca’s stomach. 

“Yeah, I guess so.” 

– 

In the continuing months, Chloe thought she might go into cardiac arrest. Because, while she wasn’t allowed to be panicked at all, she watched the calm and collected Beca Mitchell slowly become an anxious mess - from the loss of her lucky jeans to the possibility of a two headed child to the sweetest four am half-conscious confession that she  _really_ hoped the kid could make music. And the panic slowly made Chloe more and more nervous too, only she had to hide it, which she didn’t resent, she just hoped that Beca would stop wincing every time she waddled to go to the bathroom. She didn’t resent it because she knew that her panic was at the surface - a simple fear that Beca would fall or strain herself and they’d lose what they’d been caring for for eight and a half months. Beca’s fear, though, stretched deeper - the fear of dedicating her life to more than one thing, the fear of becoming picture perfect replications of her parents, the fear of producing a child that wouldn’t be able to smile as much as Chloe did or sing as much as Beca…who didn’t have that kind of heart because her moms didn’t  _give_ her that kind of heart. Beca was scared of messing it all up, scared that she wasn’t enough. 

And, at least in that, Chloe wasn’t scared at all. So she swallowed the other panics easily, willing to endure them to lessen Beca’s uncertainties, willing to spend every minute telling Beca how wonderful she was going to be, willing to suffer through the break-downs and the eye-rolls to ease the weight of these nine months, and, ultimately, willing to have her hand nearly broken as she was cussed out profusely when their daughter was born two weeks early. 

“My fault?” Chloe said later, when Beca was smelling - yes,  _smelling,_  Baby Bella’s forehead -, pushing a sweat-saturated curl that had poked out of Beca’s ponytail. Earlier that day, between a string of truly creative curse words, Beca had yelled at Chloe “This is all  _your_ fault, you know”, which, even then, made Chloe laugh. Beca rolled her eyes, wincing at the sound of her words thrown back at her. 

“Shut the fuck up, Beale,” Beca muttered, the baby’s fingers wrapped around the tip of her thumb. 

“ _Language,”_ Chloe chastised again, touching Beca’s nose with her finger before looking down at the baby, who’s eyes were dark - like Beca, which, though her mom wasn’t entirely pleased that the Beale Blue Eyes weren’t passed on, made Chloe almost giddy, because this baby had been on the earth for less than a few hours and already had all the angst in the world. “And I’ll gladly take the blame.” 


	4. The One in the Middle of the Night

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bechloe prompt: it's the middle of the night, their baby is crying, and Chloe doesn't want to wake up, so she tries to convince beca to go see to the baby — sent by anonymous

She rarely slept more than a couple of hours a night - up until the wee hours of the morning working on whatever mix she’d concocted on her drive home from work - which was why Chloe normally accepted the role of midnight momma, unwilling to deprive the other girl of the single ounce of sleep she typically allowed herself; it was an exceptionally long day, though, parent-teacher conferences coming right off the heels of a finger-painting incident that resulted in two red toddler handprints on her chest. 

Which was why when Chloe heard the first inklings of their daughter’s “gifted voice”, she took the risk and poked Beca’s shoulder, earning only a groan from the smaller woman - she was determined to stay in bed, though, so she turned Beca over, nuzzling into her neck and pressing a kiss to her collarbone, one hand ghosting over her spine in a move that Chloe _knew_ would make her shiver involuntarily. 

Beca’s eyes slipped open, and she smiled blearily at the other woman, reaching out to tangle her fingers in Chloe’s hair - she leaned in for a kiss, but Chloe pulled away, offering a guilty smile as the baby’s cry crackled over the monitor once more, “I’m sorry to do this, babe, but you’ve got a much more beautiful woman demanding you in the other room, Ms. Mitchell.” 


	5. The One With No Diggity

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Someone needed fluff. Fluff happened.

“Hey, Becs…” Beca felt a hand on her shoulder, but squeezed her eyes tighter. They had two hours, at most, to enjoy this time between cooing and crying and singing and sighing, and she wasn’t going to waste it with pillow talk. After a few more nudges, though, it seemed evident that Chloe wasn’t going to let up. With a huff, she flipped over, nose to nose to her wife. 

“Your toes are fucking freezing, weirdo,” she spat. With the moonlight and the glow to Chloe’s eyes, her face was outlined sharply - the softness still there but dotted with a few bags beneath her eyes, held up by freckles that tended to hide under her daily makeup. Beca reached up to trace them, and Chloe hummed. “What’s the deal?” 

Nibbling at her lip, Chloe scanned Beca’s face - it was a move she did whenever she wanted to broach a topic with the other woman, like she was collected every pixel of data she could before deciding to speak. 

“I’m worried about her,” she finally said, her voice a small squeak. When Beca responded by sighing and turning to face the ceiling, she quickly pushed herself onto her elbows and hovered over the other girl. “Beca, I’m serious! She hasn’t smiled! Like, not once! And all the books I’ve read have said that by the eighth week a baby should be smiling.” 

“Chlo,” Beca breathed out, running her hands over her forehead and into her hair. “Maybeeee she just takes after her mom and prefers a nice, solid scowl of disdain and exasperation.”

Lightly, Chloe slapped Beca’s shoulder, then softening the gesture by nudging her forehead on the space. “I’m serious, Babes.” 

“I know you are,” Beca tried, “Just like you were serious with the spot she had on her armpit, and the shape of her belly button, and the color of her shit, and the pitch of her crying – all tell-tale signs, according to you, that something is wrong with our baby.” Turning to face Chloe again, she brushed a stray hair out of Chloe’s face. “I’m tellin’ ya, that girl’s perfect.” 

The answer wasn’t good enough for Chloe, who breathed out sharply, her lips set in determination to not be placated. It was, Beca thought, one way their baby took after her. She continued to look up at Beca, and though her arms weren’t crossed, Beca could imagine so clearly the pouty-lipped crossed-armed pose her wife would be maintaining were they out of bed – and capable of anything more than grunting and groaning their way through what had become sleepless days. 

Taking a deep breath, Beca sat up, positioning her pillow to support her back against the headboard. She fiddled with her fingers and tugged at the way her tank top was sitting on her frame.

“Fine,” she said, biting the inside of her cheek. “So what if I told you she has smiled?” 

“WHAT?!” 

“Shhh, goddammit Chlo,” Beca held a hand up to Chloe’s mouth as Chloe sat up straight, her messy bun just barely hanging onto it’s elastic. “There’s, like, a newborn in the house who I would  _really_ like to keep asleep, so if you wouldn’t mind not, yunno, squealing, then…” 

“BECA BEALE-MITCHELL, WHEN DID OUR CHILD SMILE?” 

Beca had learned throughout their friendship - and then much better as they entered into the realm of dating and marriage - that an angry Chloe was not, by any means, a Chloe that she wanted to argue with. And the woman hovering over her with a finger stretched at the tip of her nose didn’t seem too keen on being messed with. So Beca held up her hands in mock surrender, offering up a weak smile - one that came out more like a grimace. “Um, two weeks ago, I guess? I dunno.” 

Chloe maintained enough control to lower her voice, turning it into an almost hiss. “And why on God’s green earth did you not tell me about this development?” 

Beca sighed again, looking up, and she felt the finger that Chloe stretched out press against her chest sharply. In one quick breath, she said, “BecauseYouDontWannaKnowHowIDidIt.” 

“What?” 

“Like, well, when she wakes up, you know, in the middle of the night,” Beca was scratching her head trying to explain, “I kinda sing while I feed her and burp her and stuff, but I just sing whatever’s in my head, and…I dunno…she’s got…very boss music taste I guess?” 

Without fanfare, Chloe hopped off the bed. She held her hand out to Beca, opening and closing it once. “You’re coming with me,” she said sternly, opening and closing her hand again. “Come on!” 

At that, Beca scrambled, throwing the comforter aside and stepping on the mattress to make it to where Chloe was, taking her hand only to realize her arm was about to pulled out of it’s socket with the speed that Chloe was walking. 

“Chloe, no, we’re not waking her up so that you ca–” 

“Beca, excuse you, but I have been denied the sight of my daughter smiling for far too long, and if I were in your shoes, I wouldn’t be fighting this,” she’d thrown open the door while saying it, but when they both hovered over the edge of the crib, her features softened. The baby’s hands were balled into tiny fists and held around her head like headphones, and her lips were parted just enough to let out tiny puffs of breath. From where they stood, she looked like porcelain. Breakable. Light. Intangible. 

Chloe took a deep breath to break through the spell, reaching into the crib to take the baby out, letting her head fall for only a second before squeezing it in the space between her forearm and bicep. 

Beca had said it before, and she assumed she’d never stop saying it - because she said it about herself and Chloe before too, but the little girl fit so perfectly in the redhead’s arms. If she wasn’t filled with some kind of inexplicable warmth every time she witnessed it, she would be somewhat pinched with envy. (But that would’ve been easily rubbed away by the fact that Beca claimed from day one, with the pregnancy test in her hands, that she’d be the cool mom. No question about it.) 

“Babe,” Chloe said to the small figure in her arms, “Baby, come on, Sweets, you gotta wake up. Wake up for Momma.” 

When the baby squeaked, squinching her face in the same way Beca did when Chloe tried to wake her up before sunrise and rubbing her fists against her eyes, Chloe quickly turned to Beca. Despite the softness in her words, she said, sharply, “Do it.” 

“Chloe, is this really nece–”

“Do it!” 

Beca sighed, looking up. She was standing in her daughter’s room in a tank top and underwear, forcing a child that never seemed to willingly sleep anyway to wake up and listen to her “sick beats”. Because the woman standing across from her, donning a flannel pajama set that would’ve looked ridiculously on anyone else, demanded it. 

She wondered - like she had so many times in the past 9 or 10 months - how the hell her life turned into this. 

She wondered - like she had so many times in the past 9 or 10 months - how the hell she was lucky enough to have her life turn into this. 

“ _It’s going down fade to Blackstreet/The homies got abby collab creations Funk like acne/No doubt…”_

When she started, Chloe’s mouth fell open slowly, her eyebrows rising up to her hairline. It would’ve been comedically dramatic if she didn’t hold that expression for entirely too long. 

“… _I put it down never slouch/As long as my credit could vouch/A dog couldn’t catch me, “ass” out/Tell me who could stop with Dre makin’ moves…”_

 _“_ Beca, what the hell?” Chloe finally managed  to say, but Beca held her hand out, turning it into a point towards the baby in Chloe’s arms, telling her to hush before the trick was ruined. 

“ _Attracting honeys like a magnet/_ _Giving them ear-gasms with my mellow accent/_ _Still moving his flavor with the homeys Blackstreet & Teddy…” _

The sound broke through Beca’s rap, bubbling up from the surface with a spit noise and carrying with it a squeal. Chloe gasped, her squeal matching her daughter’s. Momentarily, Beca thought Chloe might forget altogether that she was holding a baby with all her excitement, as she watched the other woman fight the desire to jump. 

“… _The original rump shakers…”_ she continued, stepping closer until she could put a hand on the baby’s blanket, leaning in. The little girl’s smile spread as far as it could go, shining from one mom to the other and back again with gooes and cooes and little baby squeaks. She grabbed Beca’s thumb, shaking it back and forth, and Beca - despite the time of night and the situation at hand, spread an open-mouthed smile over her face, her eyes wide with peek-a-boo glee. For an instant, her smile broke into shock, because from just above where she was leaning over the baby, she heard a voice break out. 

“ _Shorty get down, good lord…baby’s got ‘em open all over town…”_

Standing straight again, Beca smiled at Chloe, nudging her shoulder. When they sang the next line, it was together, in harmony - that same harmony that carried them from the showers to here, in a nursery painted yellow and dotted in music notes. “ _Strictly bitchy don’t play around, cover my ground, got game by the pound..”_

Later, Beca would tease Chloe for allowing her to sing that song to the baby at all, let alone joining in. Chloe would make her swear not to tell Aubrey, who was already planning on having her boys be familiar with only Mozart, Bach, and Shania Twain. And they would both make a pact to use the time they were given to get sleep to…actually sleep - promising never to endeavor to ruin that gift by waking up the baby again. They would then proceed to break the pact, over and over and over again, because their child was “damn cute…no, I don’t care, Chloe, I can proudly say we’ve got the cutest baby in the country. Anyone who disagrees can fight me.” 


	6. The One Where Their Daughter Becomes Their Son

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> HI HERES THE PROMPT: so bechloes daughter is maybe 4 years old? and she comes up to her moms and says "im a boy" and they are kinda confused but they sit her down and have a talk with her and stuff and then maybe it goes through the years of her becoming a him :-) THANKS — sent by anonymous

They were happy when they found out they were going to have a daughter. More than happy, really, because Chloe had dreams of frilly dresses for family Christmas parties, and - though Beca wouldn’t admit it - she had dreams of braiding her hair before school. 

And while Chloe fell into some kind of feminist, sex-positive black hole around the time they were planning their wedding - scorned by more than one of her perfect catering company or reception hall - she couldn’t resist the pink teddy bear in the gift shop in the hours after Beca gave birth or the constant marathon of Disney princess movies that were playing in the background of their car-rides. 

Yes, they were happy when they found out they were going to have a daughter. They had dreams, and they had wishes, and they had images in their heads of prom prep and wedding dresses. But they weren’t attached to those dreams, those wishes, those images. 

They weren’t attached to their daughter. 

They were attached to their kid. To the curve of her smile when Chloe turned on Taylor Swift while making dinner or the sparkle in her eye when Beca threw her onto the king-sized bed, accompanied by a giggle that tore through the room and broke up whatever mope Chloe was currently participating in. 

So when, in the middle of tying her hair in haphazard pigtails on a morning where Chloe had a faculty meeting and there wasn’t nearly enough time to get her to daycare, Beca’s immediate response to her daughter’s proclamation of, “Mommy, I’m a boy” was to say, “Yeah? I’ll bet,” because she wasn’t really listening and because if she was listening, she wouldn’t know what to say anyway. Wouldn’t even come close to knowing. Things like that were a part of Chloe’s territory - Beca called dibs on things like “proper” music eduction and how to bake cookies in the microwave. 

Which is why later that night, as the events of the day rattled off in Beca’s mind, the words finally stuck out with the sharpness that it originally needed, and Beca turned around, grabbing a strand of Chloe’s hair and twirling it around her finger. “I need to talk to you,” she said, “Because I don’t know what to do about this.” 

“What to do” turned out to be remarkably simple, actually. And, Beca thought, Chloe was really to be credited for that, because she was the one who led the conversation, stationed at the dinner table that night, using her soft tones and feather pitch to explain the complexities of the situation to their four year old daughter. 

And the next day, Beca sat at the floor of the walk-in closet, watching her child zoom in and out of clothing racks until he picked out his outfit, holding it up to Beca for approval. Chloe, who was leaning against the side of the doorway, squealed an excited, “You’re going to look _so_  handsome!” and Beca worked on brushing his (unfortunately) genetically passed down unruly curls into some semblance of a clean hairstyle. It wasn’t the frilly Christmas dresses or braiding sessions that either of them expected when they got the ultrasound results, but when Beca dropped him off at daycare, he seemed almost lighter somehow - if it was even possible for a kid that young to be weighed down - and when Chloe picked him up, their daily tickle fight to get strapped into the car seat lasted several extra minutes. 

Over the years, the dreams easily shifted. It didn’t take as much active effort as either parent thought, actually, once they started recognizing that the essential twinkle of their child didn’t change with the pronouns he preferred to use or the clothes he wanted to wear. One night, Beca woke up grinning from a dream about moving him into college. Stuck in traffic, Chloe found herself day-dreaming about fitting him for his prom tux. 

And that’s how it worked - not one immediate fix, but a slow shift of what they thought their lives would be after that ultrasound and nursery painting session to what their lives were, which, still, was better than anything they could’ve ever dreamed. Because they weren’t attached to those dreams, those images, those ideas and that daughter - they were attached to their child, his dreams, his images, his ideas, and that proved to be more than enough. 

 

\--

Occasionally, Chloe would wake up in the middle of the night, tapping Beca lightly on the shoulder, and express some worry that she only set free when it was dark enough to not see the words when they left her mouth. As if during daylight hours, the worries were more real, more dangerous, and therefore less acknowledge. Or, even, not acknowledged at all. 

And Beca could count on both hands the amount of times Chloe woke her up with the same worry glossed over her lips. It was silly, really, because what was a school dance in the timeline of a lifetime? But Chloe was Chloe - the woman who lived for those Hallmark moments without apology - and their son had inherited that same sense of undiluted spirit for those little things. It was one of the one million reasons Beca couldn’t stop smiling when she was with them - felt herself soften at the edges every second of every day so that when she took the time to look back at herself, she felt not unlike a melted stick of butter - they saw a brightness in the things that deserved capital letters and required invitations, where she could only see frivolity. So the first time Chloe woke her up, when their son was six years old, to ask her what prom would be like for him, Beca didn’t laugh. She bit her lip, pulled Chloe closer, and said, “It’s going to be amazing. Obviously. If he gets his looks from his mom.” 

Then, the midnights were interspersed, normally triggered by first days of junior high or that time of the year when Chloe’s students were gearing up for the Sadie Hawkins dance. And each time, Beca, groggy-eyed and wanting nothing more than to return to the safety of her sleep, would smack her lips, smiling, to say, “You worry too much. He’ll be fine. Better than fine. He always is.” 

They were worriers, and their son was a steam-roller, crashing over every building of anxiety they tended to build around him. That’s how it worked. His first real hair-cut took a week of discussion, lip-biting, and hours spent in the bathroom with gel and a comb, but the minute he stepped into the barber shop, he shook the man’s hand and confidently gave an exact description of what he wanted. Beca thought he got that from Chloe, because even if years spent watching her son grow up had made Chloe a little more frazzled, hesitant, and uncertain, she still had the way of taking a breath and running headlong into something without an awareness of the reaction of those around her. So, naturally, following all the midnight fears centering around a simple night, their son sat at the dinner table and proudly announced that he asked Tommy to prom. 

Tommy, who had been his best friend since they were three, who held his hand when they walked through seventh grade hallways to find their classes, who fought to get him on the football team even though he was more preoccupied with the Spring musical. Tommy, who had said yes when he parked his car in front of his house and wrote out in pepperoni pizza slices “Prom?” while concocting his own version of one of his mother’s mixes. 

It was safe to assume that Chloe would cry no matter what he said about prom, because it was  _their son_ , and because she imagined any and every future wherein he was standing there, boutineer or corsage in hand, looking like the million bucks that she knew he was. He chuckled lightly, looking down at his plate in a rare display of shyness, as Chloe squealed and stood to get a napkin so her mascara wouldn’t run. 

“This is…” she said, wiping at the corners of her eyes, “This…God. I’m so excited for you.” 

Beca watched his humility, eying the blush the spread up his cheeks, and she reached out a hand to rest on his. “You’re such a great kid,” she said quietly, biting back the pride that was creeping up on her smile, “And I’m so proud to be your mom.” 

Okay, so maybe that penchant for those trivial life moments was spreading onto her. The Beale genes were infectious though, and if she were being honest, there was something to seeing her son be everything they hoped he could be that made everything seemed like it was grounded in a thick black line that made her feel inexpressibly secure. 

And on the morning of prom, Chloe raced around the house, looking for keys that were on the middle of the kitchen counter to pick up the tux. He tried it on, knocking lightly on the door to Beca’s studio and stepping in with his eyes covered by hair. It was powder blue, because Beca had been stupid enough to let Chloe and him go to the store alone, but it was fitted just so, and when he glanced up at his mom, his eyes were impossibly bright. Beale-ian. 

He was tugging at the sleeves to do something with his hands, embarrassed by the way Beca gasped when she saw him. 

“Don’t get all Mom on me, Ma,” he said out of the corner of his mouth, and she reached up to punch him on the shoulder. 

“I birthed you,” she argued, “I can get hormonal if I want to, ‘kay?” 

He pursed his lips, nodding once, because there was something about seeing the watery look to Beca’s eyes that always made him feel like he’d done something right in what had felt like a pool of something wrongs. 

They went into the living room, where Tommy was sitting nervously on the couch, looking with relief at the two of them when they walked through the door. 

“Tommy,” Beca said, eyes scanning him for threats. He grinned back at her, holding out his hand. 

“Mrs. Beale-Mitchell,” he answered, shaking her hand once before pulling his date into a hug and running his thumb over his jawline. “You look…great.” 

“Yeah,” he said breathily, “So do you.” 

Chloe forced them to take pictures, tutting once when there seemed to be slight reluctance so that everyone had pushed their smiles a little higher just to keep her satisfied. They were a half hour late to their dinner reservations because Chloe needed to find just the right light, and Beca  _knew_ there was another memory card  _somewhere around here._ When they left, the parents stood in the window, watching the car pull out of the driveway like they watched the bus stop at the sidewalk so many years ago. 

Chloe turned to Beca, taking a deep breath. “Wow,” she said. Beca nodded, taking Chloe’s hand. “That felt good.” 

“Yeah,” Beca agreed, pulling Chloe close to her. They both had been shaking - half nerves, half adrenaline - but when Beca placed a hand on Chloe’s hip, they managed to still. “We did good, right? I mean…We got incredibly lucky but…we did good, too, right?” 

“Oh yeah,” Chloe said, grinning with a confident nod. “We did great.” 

They stood there, watching the empty driveway for a second before Chloe spoke again. “I don’t know how, though.” 

Beca nodded against Chloe’s shoulder, pressing a kiss to it once. “I’ve got a feeling it was all him,” she admitted, “And we were just along for the ride.” 

 

 


	7. The One With the Rebellious Teen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> bechloe as moms dealing with parent-teacher/principal meetings over the 'wrongdoings' of their child — sent by anonymous

“Chlo, I’m gonna need you to chill the fuck out, please.”

Chloe was pacing outside the entrance to the principal’s office, her hands running over the hem of her dress for momentum. The heels she wore found a way to clack on the ground despite the thin, dust-littered carpet, and it matched the beat of the clock ticking above the secretary’s desk. When Chloe stopped momentarily, her eyes buy wide and accentuated dangerously by the blue and teal polka-dot dress she wore, the secretary looked up too, a glare being shot over glasses that were smaller than her beady bird eyes.

“Beca, it’s language like that that got Pipes here in the first place.” Her voice was quiet, rushed, and she held her finger out towards Beca’s forehead. The other woman just rolled her eyes.

“Yes, me saying ‘fuck’ has encouraged our child to vandalize school property,” Beca muttered, picking lint from her jeans. “No, if I  _had_ to guess, it would just be her stunning stupidity that did the trick.”

“Hey!” Piper finally looked up from the computer that she was typing furiously in, tearing a headphone out for a second. “I’m, like, right here!”

“Yeah, and, like, ‘right here’ is the principal’s office,” Beca said in the same angst-ridden tone, wagging her head for dramatic effect and causing the teenager to groan with irritation, throwing her head back with a wince. “So stop with the ‘I’m cooler than ice’ act and try to be even a little remorseful.”

“Ma, I’m not even s—,”

“Your mother is right, you know,” Chloe said. She’d stopped her pacing again, this time turning to Piper. “This isn’t the time for the classic Beale-Mitchell pigheadedness. You walk in their with your tail between your legs, and when we leave, we’re discussing punishments.”

“Chlo, you don’t really  _discuss_ punishments,” Beca said quietly, “That’s, like, the point of punishments.”

“Oh, whatever,” Chloe snapped, wiping away the side comment with her hand but not breaking her gaze on the apathetic glare of her daughter, “It’s not like I’ve ever actually had to deal with this kind of thing before. You know your sister never—“

“Whoa, Chlo,” Beca stood up, putting two hands on Chloe’s shoulders. “We stop talking when we start comparing, yeah? Let’s just…let’s just see what happened, yeah?”

Under Beca’s touch, Chloe visibly loosened, closing her eyes and taking a deep breath through her nose. When she opened her eyes again, her lip was twisted in the panicked look that Beca had come to be entirely too familiar with. She could almost predict when Chloe was going to lift her hands up and start fanning them in her “Oh my God, how am I going to handle this” way.

“Our kid is a rebel, Beca,” she said quietly, her eyes full of horror, “She’s one of the bad kids. I never thought I’d have a bad kid. I mean I always knew that the risk existed but we tried so hard an—.”

“Whoa there, big girl,” Beca put a finger to Chloe’s lips, “Stop. Thinking. Sit. Your mind gets away from you when you’re nervous.”

Chloe nodded, turning towards the chairs to sit, but instead jolting straight up as the principal opened his door a crack and called out for Piper. The teenager left her laptop on the chair beside her, standing up with impossible slowness and heading into the room without once looking back at her moms. Beca nodded twice, looking around the room with pursed lips until Chloe nudged her, making motions for her to scoot. “Oh, shit, right, sorry.”

They scrambled into the room, which was smaller than the administration’s office, and only had room for two leather chairs apart from the one that sat behind the desk. Scattered around the walls were inspirational posters with puppies on them - one’s that always reminded Beca, weirdly enough, of Aubrey. She would try to mentally photoshop the one-liners that the blonde always had on hand, the ones that began with, “It’s like my father always said…”. On his desk was all of the typical decorations, including a golden pen stand, which Beca instinctually reached out for, tilting the pen up without realizing and immediately pulling her hand back in when the principal raced to fixed it’s angle. Awkwardly, they smiled to each other, and before holding out his hand, he wiped it on the front of his suit jacket.

“You must be…Mrs. Beale-Mitchell?”

“Uh yeah,” Beca nodded awkwardly, shaking his hand before stepping back. The principal turned to Chloe, holding his hand out again.

“And…you must be…Mrs. Beale-Mitchell, too.” With an awkward chuckle, Chloe shook his hand, and the three girls tried to communicate with their eyes the best way to figure out the two-chair situation. The end result was Beca and Piper getting the chairs with Chloe uncomfortably sitting on the arm of Beca’s chair - despite both Beca and Piper’s silent pleas for her just to stand.

As always, Chloe wasn’t entirely aware of what was considered “acceptable” behavior in formal environments.

The principal started talking, speaking in a monotone voice that seemed to carry over the three women and sink them into their seats - though Beca would deny it to a disgruntled Chloe later that night before bed, she  _definitely_ started to fall asleep halfway through the lecture that the man was giving.

What’s more, he kept throwing her occasional glares in the place of the friendly smiles he was handing Chloe, and Beca assumed it was because she and Piper shared the same crossed-armed stone-cold glare and knack for heavy eyeliner (Piper particularly liked colorful strands of hair, though, which was never really Beca’s game…thank  _god_ ). And as she noticed the way he talked more sternly when he was looking at her, she started to become more and more determined to  _not_ listen…it was instinct, left over from long hours spent in rooms with people who thought they were better than her because they wore suits and she wore torn jeans.

Which was why it took her more than a few moments to realize when the room fell silent and Chloe’s eyes were focused intently on Beca’s blank stare, knowing.

“I’m sorry, what was that?” she tried, hating the way Chloe rolled her eyes and uncrossed her legs in annoyance.

“Mr. Turner found Pipes spray-painting over the STEM display,” Chloe explained under her breath. Beca had to turn back towards Chloe and inspect her face once more to be sure that she found the proper emotion there. Because she swore that she saw some glee in her wife’s eyes. “It was in protest of cutting the art department funds,” Chloe continued, and this time Beca was sure: Chloe was proud.

“Oh,” Beca said, scratching her head to hide her small grin, “Uh, sorry?”

 


	8. The One With the Nap-Time

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> beca and chloe hava baby, who is down for a nap. they decide to try and have sex for the first time since they had the kid, but while they’re kissing and undressing in bed they accidentally fall asleep, and only wake up when the baby monitor goes off two hours later. — sent by anonymous

She was not sure how it was possible to feel so heavy and so light at the same time. 

Dragged down by the weight of every moment, her eyelids were in a permanent state of fighting to stay open, and while Beca seemed to use this exhaustion as fuel to get her on the road to mania - constantly moving through the house, bouncing over the counters and cleaning spots that don’t exist or baking a three course meal between naptimes - Chloe could barely stand. When she had just enough coffee to operate at a normal level, she could recognize the dark circles around Beca’s eyes too, the way her lip twitched when she stood still and she occasionally would stare out the window for extended periods of time. Acting like someone fresh off a mountain dew binge was always how Beca managed her sleeplessness, and while Chloe was always perky, without sleep she struggled to maintain the pep in her step. 

But she wasn’t complaining. Not by a longshot. Because the source of her exhaustion came from the smallest bundle of drool and new baby smell she could imagine, tufts of baby red hair sticking out from the blanket Beca used as a cover when she fed their daughter. And she thought that there was a strange kind of cocaine endorphin released the day she first held Piper, because she was permanently running on empty and flying high from every moment after that. 

“What’re you doing,” Chloe said lightly when Beca slipped into the room, peeking out from the corner wall and biting her lip. “Babe, what’s that look for?” 

The other woman skipped over to the bed, crawling onto it slowly. “Had my six week checkup today,” she said, pursing her lips with a smile. There was a crusted stain of spit-up on the collar of the flannel shirt she wore - her favorite - and she threw the washcloth that was sitting on her shoulder to the side of the room. 

“Everything’s good?” Chloe said, scooting down on the bed so that she wasn’t sitting up anymore, her hand reaching up to where her head lie on the pillow. 

“Fucking fantastic,” Beca hummed, taking the hand that Chloe moved and shifting it to the other side of Chloe’s head, effectively turning her body so she was facing the ceiling. Chloe giggled sleepily, running her thumb over the inside of Beca’s arm as the other woman moved to her knees, placing one on either side of Chloe’s torso. As she leaned down to press a light kiss against Chloe’s collarbone, the redhead closed her eyes, sighing. 

“I take it you got the go ahead,” she said breathily. Beca hummed confirmation at the base of Chloe’s ear. “That’s good,” she sighed, “That’s really, really…good.” 

–

She woke up as soon as she heard the cry. It was an instinct she didn’t know she had until a few weeks ago. While she was always a light sleeper, it took the smallest hint of the baby’s cry to jolt her out of whatever dreamworld she was floating in. Beca, who was flitting at 100 miles per hour in all her exhaustion, struggled to jump back from whatever pause she took, groaning into her pillow and praying for the cries to stop before she had to find the power to wake up. And Chloe would normally let Beca sleep when she could, because the poor woman had been through enough in the past nine months to  _need_ the sleep when she could manage, but this particular time, she couldn’t exactly slip out of bed without Beca’s help. 

“Um, Becs,” she said quietly, poking at Beca’s bare stomach and trying to stifle a laugh at the snort that Beca let out in response. “Becs, the baby.” 

“Nnngh.” She was drooling on Chloe’s shoulder, using her almost-naked body as a bed. Chloe tried to nudge her off, but Beca resisted, holding tighter to Chloe and nuzzling her face into Chloe’s collarbone. 

“Beca, I can’t get up,” Chloe whispered, nudging at Beca again, “Becs.” 

She felt Beca wince, squeezing her eyes shut more in resistance before the girl sighed, pressing her hand over Chloe’s hipbone. “We did  _not_ just do that,” she said, and Chloe laughed. 

“We totally did,” she said in response, pushing Beca’s hair back from her forehead. “Sorry, Babes.” 

“We’re still sex goddesses,” Beca said into Chloe’s chest, still refusing to move. Chloe could _feel_ the way Beca furrowed her eyebrows in a grimace. She laughed, Beca’s “pillows” moving enough to get her to lift her head and show Chloe her embarrassed face. 

“Oh, of course,” Chloe said easily, smiling. 

“Fucking like bunny rabbits,” Beca said, her eyes still half closed. 

“Mmhmmm,” Chloe said, her mind still focused on the baby monitor. “Gotta maintain our scandalous reputation.” 

“’Bree doesn’t hear ‘bout this,” Beca grunted, finally moving off of Chloe and grabbing the blankets that was at their feet. She didn’t bother to put her shirt back on or take off her bra, curling into a tiny ball and closing her eyes again. “Because we’re scandalous sex goddesses.” 

“Vow of silence taken, Becs,” Chloe said. She stood up from the bed, re-buttoning her shirt. “In fact, I think she should babysit for the weekend so we can follow your doc’s orders.” 

“Mmmm,” Beca hummed in agreement, curling tighter. Chloe chuckled lightly, patting Beca’s head and placing a kiss to her temples. “Love you, MILF.” 

“Don’tchoo forget it,” Beca muttered. 


	9. The One Where Beca's in Labor

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> a sequel to the pregnant beca one where she is in labor/having the kid! — sent by anonymous

“Chlo,” Chloe waded through the haze of her dreams to reach Beca’s voice, quiet and covering a certain sharpness, “Babe, wake up.” 

And then, once she was in the shallow end of sleepiness, it was easy enough to bounce up, eyes wide and tone worried. “What is it? Is everything okay?” 

Beca nodded, biting her lip. Her hand was on her tummy, her back against the headboard. She squeaked slightly as she winced, and Chloe shifted again to be sitting straight up, knees under her. “Becs, what’s happening?” 

“It,” she said quietly, between her teeth, “It’s happening.” 

“Wha–” Chloe’s hands were hovering over Beca’s stomach, ready to move when needed. Beca flashed her a weak smile, and her eyes widened. “Oh,  _it’s_ happening,” she said with renewed understanding. “It’s happening…It’s…It’s happening!” 

Beca chuckled lightly before it was broken by another wince. “Shit, it’s happening,” Chloe repeated, eying Beca. “It’s happening.” 

“Hey, Chlo?” Beca bit out, “You wanna stop practicing for your role as a parrot and start getting the car ready?” 

“Right,” Chloe said breathlessly, “Right, yes. Yeah. Of course.” She started to slip off the bed, racing into the bathroom for the bag they had packed a few weeks ago, just in case. She slipped over the wooden floors, sliding through the room and trying to keep her balance in check. “It’s happening!” she shouted from the bathroom, and Beca laughed. When she left the bathroom, it was with an excited bounce and a spirited squeal. “It’s happening it’s happening it’s happening!” 

She ran down the stairs with the bag, her heart racing entirely too many beats per minute. She made it into the car with the engine on, garage opened, before she looked around, confused by the silence. 

Storming back through the house, she found Beca in the same place as she’d left her earlier. 

“Yeah, I thought there was something you forgot,” Beca said jokingly, reaching for Chloe and taking her hand immediately. She leaned on the redhead, her breathing slightly labored, and Chloe thought,  _This…this I can help with._

Because she’d been waiting nine months to be of assistance. Nine months of excitement, six months of absolute panic, and three months of begging Beca to let her help with the basic things. Like shaving legs that Beca couldn’t even see anymore or putting away dishes that Beca couldn’t reach. This…this she could help with. Because Beca was letting her. Slowly walking down the steps, one hand on Beca’s lower back to keep her steady, she wasn’t in control of what she was saying, only that she was talking incessantly and Beca was nodding seriously. 

“No,” Beca said as soon as they left the garage, “This,” she pointed to the radio, “Is unacceptable music to welcome our kid to the world with.” 

Chloe grinned, taking the finger that Beca was using to point at the radio. She squeezed it lightly. “First of all, you’re not giving birth in this car, so slow your roll. Second,” she said, letting go of the finger to press a button on the stereo and letting Beca’s freshman year mixes sink into the car, “I should be offended that you have such little faith in me.” 

–

Well, it wasn’t a short labor. That, at least, was what the doctor had said after the tenth hour, with a self-deprecating laugh that brought absolute daggers to Beca’s eyes. Chloe had to press a kiss to Beca’s sweaty temple to keep her from attacking the innocent man in the white coat, though she too was questioning the safety of her heartrate going into the eleventh hour. Aubrey and Jesse had been pacing the waiting room since they woke up that morning, despite Aubrey being told to stay on bedrest because, “Stress is counterproductive to…you know…pushing out two healthy babies at once,” Jesse had said. 

Stacie was, apparently, speeding to get there from her last lecture, four hours away. Chloe told her in no uncertain terms that it seemed like there was no need to risk the speeding ticket, but Stacie wasn’t buying it. “A Godmother can’t miss the birth, Chloe, that’s, like, a requirement.” 

“How’re you doin’, Becs?” It was asked cautiously, between commercial breaks for the nonsensical soap opera on television. Beca glared at her, sweat plastered to her face. 

“I don’t understand why I can’t have the fucking drugs yet,” she groaned, squeezing Chloe’s hand again as she set her jaw and closed her eyes. “And don’t you dare yell at me for swearing, because you fucking did this to me.” 

“I know, Babe,” Chloe said quietly, kissing Beca’s hand. She was working off of only a few hours of sleep, one cup of vending machine coffee, and a power bar. Granted, she wasn’t having a baby, but she didn’t feel like a thousand bucks either. Still, she saw the balloons that were quickly deflating in Jesse’s hands in the waiting room, and would glance every once in a while at the mountain under Beca’s hospital gown, thinking of the list of names they picked out, and it was as if she had been recharged. Refueled. Ready for the next set of contractions, the next string of curse words, or the next doctor visit that hinted they still had to wait. 

It was worth it, unbelievably worth it, and she tried her best to communicate this to Beca whenever she could, through touch or through kiss or through looks shared. And when they finally determined it was time, she flipped off the TV to play the mixes Beca picked out for the occasion. 

“Chlo?” she said, and it was weaker than all the other times that day, acutely reminiscent of the “Chlo” that started their morning - small and scared and uncertain, flustered. Beca was looking for something in Chloe’s eyes, some semblance of strength, and she had a hold of both of Chloe’s hands. 

And Chloe thought:  _This….this I can help with._ So she met Beca’s stare with certainty, pulling from them the deep, sure blues and breathing everything she could into the glance. She pried a hand away from Beca’s grasp, reaching up to catch the bead of sweat dripping from Beca’s forehead before pushing the hair back. Between contractions earlier that day, Beca had knotted it in a french braid, but the edges where curling. She had circles under her eyes, enough to replace the eyeliner that was absent from her face. On her nose, beneath beads of sweat, were the freckles that always hid under foundation. Chloe ran a thumb over her nose, and Beca closed her eyes, leaning into the slight touch. She was beautiful. More than attractive, or aesthetically pleasing. She was genuinely and undeniably a completely new level of beautiful. Chloe kissed the space between her eyebrows. 

“You’re going to be great,” she said quietly, her voice a song. “You’re Beca effin Beale-Mitchell. And you’re going to rock this.” 

Beca swallowed, looking up at Chloe, and nodded fervently. “Okay,” she said with a shaky breath. “Okay. This is happening.” 

Chloe smiled. “This is happening,” she said slowly, squeezing Beca’s hand lightly. The doctor took the pause as enough of a signal to get started, and Chloe wondered, later on, how life could possibly move in slow motion and fast forward at the same time. 

How a room could be deafening and muted simultaneously. 

How she could feel every sense on high-alert and like she was walking through a haze all at once. 

But mostly, she wondered how she ever saw the world before hearing the cries of her daughter, because she’d inherited both of her mother’s lungs, apparently, and for both of them it was if they hadn’t heard music until that point. 

Beca threw her head back on the pillow, sobbing through her smile, and Chloe combed at the hair that had come free from the braid. 

“I did it,” Beca said between sobs. 

“You did it,” Chloe said, breathless. 

“We did it,” Beca repeated. 


	10. The One That Will Fucking Break Your Heart (Or the Reason Beca Carried the Baby)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I'm so sorry! I am truly soooo sorry to everyone who reads this. But I was listening to this song in the shower and got more headcannon as to why Beca carries their babies. "Small Bump" by Ed Sheeran.... I'm not crying, you're crying. SORRY!!! I AM SO SORRY! — sent by scrawniest-calamity

She sits in the hospital waiting room and thinks about how cold they keep it. She thinks that they should have the technology to make every room smell like home, somehow, so that everyone feels safe, at least. Because she sits in the hospital waiting room, and all she can smell is the nurse’s corn beef sandwich, the feeling in her fingers lost to the cold of the winding hallways. 

And she thinks that she always wanted her to have curly hair. The kind of hair she had when she was growing up, tamed by brushes and pats of her head until it all tamed. She thinks that she always wanted her to have blue eyes. The kind of eyes that can turn the world on your side, any day of any week. The eyes that she woke up to every morning. She wanted a daughter that had those eyes, and a fighting chance. 

She thinks that she’s scared, though she can’t tell, because she’s so cold that she can’t feel her fingers. 

The last time she was scared was when she found out. That fear was different - it bounced. It bubbled. It shook her hands, because she didn’t know that she was capable of loving anything more than she loved the woman who told her that she was going to be a mother. She didn’t know that she would be able to hold her in her hands without dropping her, or that, if she could manage that, she’d ever be able to put her down. It was the fear of finding the right name for what would become the light of her life. It was the fear of finding the right song for her second one and only. 

It was the fear of giving a future to something that she breathed life into. The fear of a hand wrapped around her finger that could spin her entire world like a basketball.   
  
She sits in the hospital waiting room and thinks about how they should have music playing. She thinks that they should have the technology to build sound proof walls so that she can stop mistaking the beeps in the other room as shouts of her name, or that every cry of a baby doesn’t make her heart plummet to her toes. Because she sits in the hospital waiting room, and she can hear it all and nothing at all, and she thinks that she’s scared, though she can’t tell, because she’s so cold that she can’t feel her fingers. 

And she thinks that she always wanted her to have the twisted smile. The kind of smile that Chloe had when they met, the kind that hinted at a secret and a kiss on the corner of her lip like Wendy Darling. She thinks that she didn’t even realize that she could be real before her. 

“The size of a grain of rice?” she had read off the book on Chloe’s nightstand a few night’s earlier. Patting her belly softly, Chloe hummed. 

“Half a grain,” she said, turning to sleep. 

And she thought, as she closed her eyes, that that was miraculous. 

So she holds her hands together tightly, pressed against her forehead and pushing back the sounds she hears that speed and slow all at once. And she imagines that she’s holding her, so tiny, in the dark, warm space between her palms. It is so bright here, so cold, and she imagines that right there in her hands, the baby could sleep. Sleep until it is time to wake up and meet her. Sleep until the doctors say it’s okay to come. 

And she knows it now. Knows that it’s fear. Different from the bouncing, bubbling fear, because this one crackles like ice glass on a windshield. Fear of more than finding the right song for her second one and only - fear that she would never the the chance. She realizes that it’s been there for hours, stemming from the moment Chloe called her name from the bathroom, steering her through the snowy streets until she parked herself in the hospital waiting room, where it is too cold and too loud and too quiet all at once. Where the only thing she can smell is the nurse’s corn beef sandwich. 

She whispers between her hands, hoping that somewhere warm and dark and smelling like Chloe’s vanilla and citrus, she is hearing it. “I loved you,” she says, “And I never met you.

“But I wanted to.

Meet you.

You were the love of my life.

And I’m sorry I couldn’t

Keep you safe.”   
  
For a few more weeks, just keep her safe. 

She thinks that she would have curly hair. Eyes that made the world do her bidding. That twisted smile and a kiss on the corner of her lips. 

She thinks that she would be so much good, and she thinks maybe she still will, somewhere that everyone calls “up there”. 

And she thinks that “up there” is some seriously selfish bullshit, because she never got to say hi, and she never gets to know why. 


	11. The One With Hiccups and Pikachu

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You *want* to make preggo!Beca a series? Really? Well, ok then. I, Preggo-Her-Eggo Anon, is all about it and will wriggle in my seat because fluffy! You probably shouldn't think about how Beca has the stuffed Pikachu because Chloe not only won it for her at the fair, she can actually mimic the voice (Pi-ka-chu!). And she makes that voice to Beca's stomach every time the baby hiccups... Carry on. *tips hat.* — sent by anonymous

“You’re the world’s biggest nerd,” Beca said, taking the stuffed animal anyway. Chloe beamed proudly, patting the Pikachu on the head. 

“I’m  _your_ nerd,” she chirped easily, “And I spent fifty bucks trying to win that game, so a thank you would be nice.” 

Hugging the toy closely, Beca leaned over to give Chloe a kiss on the cheek. With one arm wrapped around Pikachu and another hugging Chloe’s side, they walked over to where the amusement park was selling funnel cake, because Chloe was waiting all day for one, and was _not_ going to share one bit with Beca (until, of course, she remembered how much of a messy eater Beca is, and how adorable it would be to see her deal with the battle of powdered sugar). 

Pikachu remained a solid staple throughout their lives. From Beca’s room in the Bellas house, it would occasionally hop to Chloe’s bed - particularly on the days that Chloe seemed to be grayer than usual. The best days - or, nights, actually - were when the Pikachu was joined by a tiny woman in pajama pants and bare-feet just, “really needing someone to be with”. 

When they moved into their tiny apartment in LA, it was the first piece of “furniture” (Beca used it as a pillow more often than not) they owned, and when they made it into an actual house, it sat on a pile of decorative pillows that Chloe insisted dolled up their bedroom. ( “To be fair, Chlo, no one is going to be in our bedroom. So the logic is flawed, and I have to dodge a pile of pillows every fucking night when I’m trying to pee”). 

The most recent development with the Pikachu, their little pal, was currently growing in Beca’s abdomen. Although Chloe claimed she’d made the noise plenty of times before in front of Beca, the first time Beca heard Chloe say, in the same squished voice of the stuffed animal they shared, “Pika-chuuuu” was when she felt the tiny bump under her hands start to hiccup. 

“Whoa,” she’d said, running her hand over her stomach. The Pikachu was being used as a lower back pillow at the moment, and Beca’s other hand was massaging the space above her hipbone. “Chlo.” 

From the kitchen, Chloe spun around, putting down the pot of stir-fry she was making. She nearly hopped to the couch, confused by the tone Beca was using. It was both amazed and uncomfortable, a sort of breathless grunt. 

“What’s wrong? What’s happening?” 

“Nothin’,” Beca said simply, pointing to her belly. “Hiccups.” 

“Hiccups?”

Beca nodded, the grin on her face growing into a smile, and Chloe nearly melted. Because the thing about Beca was that she rarely smiled. More than that, she rarely  _let_ herself smile. And Chloe was learning to love the nonsensical, hysterical smile of amazement that passed over Beca’s face whenever they discovered something new about their future daughter. Because it was infectious and adorable and overall capable of turning Chloe’s insides upside down. 

She giggled then, biting her lip to cover it only to see that Beca was giggling too. Putting both hands on the bump under Beca’s sweater, she squinched her nose. “Pikachuuuu,” she said, her voice high and squeaky. Beca giggled more, grabbing Chloe’s hand and holding it. 

“Don’t make me fucking laugh,” she said between bursts, “The kid kicks when I laugh.” 

“Kickin’ and hiccupin’,” Chloe hummed, “Our baby’s drunk polka-ing, and I blame you.” 

Beca rolled her eyes, waving her hand nonchalantly with the goofy grin still on her face. 

And it became a tradition of sorts, so much so that when the baby got hiccups and Beca didn’t feel like going through the motions, Chloe would see the shift in her face and  _know_. So she would grab her belly and say it again, pushing Beca to laugh and the baby to kick so that whatever tension that had grown in the room was completely dispersed. 

It was silly. Dumb, really, and Beca hated that she loved Chloe so much for it. But it was the little things…the little things that always made her fall for the redhead over and over again. The little things that made this little thing yet more proof that everything was just right. 


	12. The One With The Cycle

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Beca and Chloe have 4 kids, 2 older girls 17 and 15 and twins a boy and a girl, 12. The twins do everything together growing up including deal with THAT TIME OF THE MONTH among the older women in the house. From son's perspective, what it is like to see the final woman of the house join the cycle. (bonus points if he finds his first chest/mustache hair) — sent by scrawniest-calamity

He watched it happen slowly, over the course of his entire lifetime, like those dioramas of deforestation they have planted at every science center his Aunt Stacie used to drag him to. It started with just two, the base pair, pushing on the gas pedal to compress irritation over the fact that the sun was too bright or the music was too loud. He just assumed that once a month, movies got sadder and he was immune to the effects of this strange phenomenon. Either way, he learned at a young age that chocolate cured all, and a bimonthly breakfast in bed never failed to do just the trick. 

Then, he watched the house shift, as Piper slipped into the pattern, too. Of course, she was never entirely  _un_ grumpy, arms permanently crossed and various streaks of color staining her hair by the week, but there were times - he thought it was just around the full moon - when she would snap. Somewhere beneath the black nail polish and permanent scowl, she would typically still be free for a solid night of video games, or, at the very least, laugh at a line from Grayson’s new joke book. She had a soft spot for him, though she would deny it vehemently, on every day except for a week at the end of the month. Then, it was screams and slamming doors, almost always aimed at Beca even though Chloe was the one who responded by crying in the background of the fight. 

Losing Harper to the strange lunar calendar of werewolves and Beale-Mitchell women should’ve hurt the most. Because Harper was bright colors and chipper words, stuffing herself with as many books as she could manage and spouting proudly the facts that she found during every second of dinnertime. She wasn’t meant to roll her eyes, and Grayson was nearly certain that no part of her was capable of under-the-breath insults that her older sister always managed. Yet, eventually, she fell prey, refusing to let Grayson take one step into her room because she was “studying, you dillweed”, and taking on constant rehearsing of the flute because it was the only thing that “lessened the extreme bouts of pain that her current mental state put her in”. 

Yes, losing Harper should’ve hurt the most. Except, throughout it all, Grayson had a partner that he assumed - somewhat naively - had to be immune to this strange disease. She had to be immune, he thought, because just like him she watched the phenomenons occur and spoke openly about the strangeness of it all. They concocted werewolf theories, using their Mom’s multi-octave vocal range as proof of wolf-howling-abilities. Billie was the note-taker throughout the months, adding bouts of data here and there until they felt they had a solid enough pattern to accuse the women of the family. 

Of course, when they presented the notebook to their mother, she only blushed, sat them down, and started to braid Billie’s hair - which, to Grayson, was evidence enough that she _couldn’t_ deny their claims. She babbled on about the strange complexities of being a woman, stuttering and cursing her way through the conversation until their Mom walked in, put a hand on Billie’s face to say, “You’ll get it some day” and turned to Grayson to offer a weak, “Be nice to girls, Gray.” 

So, when Billie slipped out of their room to go to the bathroom and didn’t come back for another hour, Grayson didn’t think much of it. Mostly because he was enamored with the current book he was reading - and his mother’s mix was playing from the kitchen, turning his head onto total focus-mode - but also because he didn’t  _think_ his guard  _needed_ to be up. He thought he was safe, at the very least, from this tragedy. 

Only, Chloe spent the entire dinner grinning at Billie like she’d won the Spelling Bee or Student Council Representative, and Beca kept stealing worried glances her way, so Grayson felt that eerie sense of familiarity sink into the pit of his stomach. It wasn’t until she forced him to sit in the back of the car on the way to ice cream - with the completely irrational argument of “Gray, I’m just  _really_ not in the mood”, which seemed to be seconded by Beca and the older sister that was pushing her head out the window - that he knew what had happened. 

“She’s one of you,” he said later that night, when Billie ran upstairs to get ready for bed and he was still tucked into the side of his mother. She looked up at his mom, biting her lip. He thought he saw smiles on their faces. 

“It’s not funny,” he said, his lower lip trembling, “It’s not funny, because I don’t understand what’s happening, Ma, and it’s not fair.” 

“Oh, sh sh shhh,” Chloe moved to sit on the couch with them, taking his head and pressing it against her chest. “Hey, bud,” she said, stopping her rocking and looking him in the eyes. Her hands were soft, warm, and he sank into their familiarity. “You need some dude time, huh? I can call up Uncle Jesse tomorrow, okay?” 

He nodded, then willing pressed his head against her again, enjoying the circles she drew on his back. His mother joined in, humming lightly, until he found himself falling asleep and Chloe, somewhat uneasily, lifted him up and struggled up the steps with Beca behind them for support. 

“It’s, uh…” Uncle Jesse sat in the parking lot of the ice cream parlor, tapping against the steering wheel. His look was hazy, uncertain, but he blinked and changed tone. “…Two nights of ice cream in a row? Win-ner.” 

“Uncle Jesse,” Grayson said, his hand on the door handle, “I asked you about periods.” 

“Yeah, I know,” he said quickly, “But your moms didn’t give me a warning about this, so…so…” Still tapping his finger against the steering wheel, he broke again. His hands jumped to Grayson’s face, squeezing his cheeks between two fingers and tilting his head back. “Is that a _chin_ hair I see? Duuuude,” letting go, he held out a hand for a high five, “I’ll be showin’ ya how to shave in no time.” 

It took a Skype call with Aunt Stacie, complete with diagrams, emailed brochures, and a tampon demonstration, for him to finally get the big picture. 

And the big picture was that he didn’t really  _want_ to know the big picture. 

That, and he was relinquishing the chore of taking out the trash. 

Oh, and the power of chocolate, though that he knew from the beginning. 

“The girls in your family are impressive chicks,” Aunt Stacie finished, pointing a finger at the webcam. Grayson nodded, his hair getting in the way of his eye-sight. “But you’re a pretty impressive bro too, okay?” 

“Yeah,” he said. He pushed the hair out of the way, but it just feathered back. 

“And you’re either gonna make an awesomely understanding husband, or a great father, or both, depending on who you are way deep down. So, like, consider this hell as practice for those major leagues, O Brave One.” 


	13. The One with the Video Tapes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> *Ahem.* Before I attempt to fall asleep (and let's face it, fail miserably), I would like to leave you with the preggo-her-eggo'd image of that one time Beca stands in the doorway and secretly videotapes Chloe swaying about the room with an itty bitty Jo on her shoulder. It's a video of her trying to sing her to sleep with "It Might As Well Be Spring." But it isn't secret because Chloe knows and also keeps her own secret recordings of Beca doing the same damn thing. Fluffily yours, PHE. — sent by anonymous

They didn’t realize that they have almost identical folders on their respective computers, saved under fake names so that the other wouldn’t find them. 

Beca’s was titled “Heavy Metal Part II”, because she believed that Chloe believed she had a part one and because she knew if there was any music Chloe wasn’t interested in listening to, it was that. 

Chloe’s was titled “Avocado Recipes”, because she knew that Beca couldn’t stomach the green vegetable and didn’t understand “why it was even a thing anyway”. 

Beca looked at the folder when she had to leave for longer trips for work - scouting out a new artist or managing some portion of a press tour she never signed up for. She opened it carefully, like diving into a secret treasure chest, her fingers clammy. Then, loading on the screen was her wife, clad in a t-shirt stolen from Beca after her sophomore year boasting of the theatre camp she went to when she was fifteen. Propped on her shoulder was a bean of a tiny human, curled into her neck with only red tufts of hair peeking up around Chloe’s silhouette to be seen. Chloe bounced on her toes, back and forth or around in circles, holding the baby’s hand up wrapped around her thumb. 

Her voice was soft, higher than Beca’s register could ever manage and just warm enough to carry through the video camera:

 _“I’m as restless as a willow in a windstorm,_  
I’m as jumpy as a puppet on a string,  
I’d say that I had spring fever,  
But I know it isn’t spring.”

Chloe ventured into her folder when she had late nights at work, stuck at a parent-teacher conference or accidentally signing up for a field trip that lasted well into the evening on a bus full of hungry pre-teens. She opened it like she was twelve again, opening a piece of chocolate during lent and hoping no one noticed. Beca’s face popped up quickly, stationed at the changing table in the flannel Mr. Beale had handed down to her the last time they vacationed at their summer house. It reached down to her knees, nearly, and beneath that were boxer shorts with Mickey Mouse on them. Beca made quick motions with her hands, wrapping up the baby that sat on the changing table with a skill Chloe never knew she could manage. All the while, she sang under her breath, her voice piercing through the room in a way that Chloe’s never quite could. The baby cooed at the sound - recognizing it from the months it spent surrounded by it and only it - reaching up for Beca until the woman took the baby in her arms and started to bounce lightly in one place.

Her voice followed the tone of the movement:

 _“I’m as busy as a spider spinning daydreams,_  
I’m as giddy as a baby on a swing.  
I haven’t seen a crocus or a rosebud  
Or a robin on the wing.”  
  
And it was funny how both of them sang the words without thinking, because they told of a feeling of needing to move - to up and run with an abandon that was unique to past days of fear and insecurity and a need for zealous energy to keep them certain - but their faces communicated an absolute sense of contentment. That was what was so charming about each of the series of videos - why both Beca and Chloe went back to them so many times when they needed some sort of solace. They were both so genuinely happy to be still and stable and locked into where they were by a tiny bundle bumbling in their arms. Like it was the only place they’d ever want to be. 

Because it was. And it is. And the “Heavy Metal Part II” “Avocado Recipes” were always waiting to shoo away any doubts about that. 


	14. The One with the Announcement

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Could you please, please, pretty please write about beca telling chloe she's pregnant? I neeeds them fluffs!! — sent by anonymous

Beca stood in the doorway of their bathroom, watching the woman who was sitting with her back against the headboard. She was reading some celebrity magazine, lips pursed as she considered something until she finally turned the page, licking her fingertips to gain traction. After a few moments of this, Chloe looked up, a smile spreading over her face and smoothing out all the features of thoughtfulness. 

“What’re you doing, weirdo,” she said, putting the magazine down by her side and scooting up on the headboard. “Come here.” 

Beca shrugged, looking down. She bounced off the doorway she was leaning against, headed for the bed. Crawling from the bottom to where Chloe sat, she put her head on Chloe’s stomach, her hand wrapped around the redhead’s hips. Chloe hummed and picked up a stray curl of Beca’s twisting it around her finger. 

“I love you,” Beca sighed, to which Chloe just responded by running a thumb down the spine of her neck. “And I want to tell you something.” 

She pulled herself up, extra stray hairs now covering more than half of her face when she looked at Chloe nervously. The redhead furrowed her brow, tilting her head and squinting in confusion. 

Beca thought, in that moment, that she might be lucky enough to see a smaller version of that same face - some variation of her eyes with the pursed amusement of Choe’s curiosity and the roundest cheeks either of them could’ve imagined. She bit her lip, dropping her head onto Chloe’s chest and burrowing there. 

“What, you goof?” Chloe said with a chuckle, tapping Beca lightly on the side of her head. 

“It’s weird,” Beca said, avoiding eye contact. Chloe could see an air of mischief in her eyes - this twinkle of something exciting starting over her features - and any hint of fear at the “we need to talk” sentiment had been immediately replaced by utter excitement for whatever had the girl giggling like she’d done something. 

“You’re being weird,” Chloe muttered, unable to hold down her smile. Beca moved to look at the ceiling from where she was nearly lying on top of Chloe. 

“I know you’re making this weird,” she said, and Chloe noticed that she was twisting the hem of her t-shirt around her finger. “Okay. Okay. No, um….God….” 

“Babe,” Chloe said lightly, brushing the hair out of Beca’s face. She felt beneath her fingertips that way Beca’s grin was ever growing, and she was dying to know what thoughts had turned her into this. 

“I’m just going to say it, okay? Like, I’m going to say it, and then it’ll be done, and it’ll be said, and that’s it,” Beca said quickly, all in one breath while nodding frantically. Chloe breathed out a slight laugh and an easy “okay”, waiting with a slightly baited breath for what it was that Beca was trying to communicate.

“I’m pregnant,” Beca finally muttered, staring straight at the ceiling. For a minute, they were silent. Then, Beca shifted up, tilting her chin to look at Chloe and watch her reactions. 

“You’re….” 

“We’re pregnant,” Beca finished, her face breathing into a grin that broke almost immediately again into a giggle. She was laughing the way that Chloe loved - her face scrunched up and her voice coming out in breathless little surprised squeaks as she nodded proudly. Chloe grabbed her face, holding her cheeks between her hands and sat there for a second. 

“You’re pregnant!” she squealed, causing Beca to wince only for a second. “You’re  _pregnant!”_

 _“_ Yesp,” Beca slurred beneath Chloe’s tightening grip on her cheeks. The redhead squeaked again, her hands flying off Beca’s face to hover over her belly. 

“…In there…” she said, her voice filled with awe. Beca answered but holding her hand over her non-existent bump. Chloe saw in the touch - in it’s featherlight nature and the way she did it with every ounce of care in the word - the kind of “handle with care” magic working it’s way over Beca. “…Can I…?” 

“It’s not, like, a thing,” Beca muttered, despite the fact that she was drawing circles over her stomach. “Like it’s a blob of cells right now, but if you want…” 

“Holy shoot,” Chloe breathed out, pressing her cheek to Beca’s stomach. She breathed for a few moments, feeling the matching rise and fall of Beca’s abdomen beneath her as she reached her hand up next to her cheek and drew lines with her fingers. “Hello, baby,” she said lightly, her voice impossibly small, “Hello, baby. My baby. My…baby…hello.” 

When she pulled away, there was a place on Beca’s shirt was darker than the rest, stained with saltwater tears - a miniscule puddle, but a puddle nonetheless. Beca ran her hand over it, turning to Chloe who promptly grabbed her again by the cheeks to press a kiss against her lips. “I love you too, Beca Beale-Mitchell.” 

With eyes still closed and lips still half-pursed, Beca sighed. “Love you more, Chloe Beale-Mitchell.” 

 


	15. The First Day of School

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I love all of ur minfics<3! Can u make one about their daughter's first day of kindergarten and Beca/Chloe are be over protective parents and u can take it way from there! Again love all ur work!!! — sent by anonymous

Beca braided the little girl’s red hair in an intricate design, curling it around her head and ending it with a scrunchie that was covered in Chloe’s favorite flowers. She was wearing a sweater that reached down to her knees - a leftover from when Chloe’s older brother was just a bit older than her - and jean shorts that had a tendency to hang off her hips. Her socks were lined in lace - dubbed by Chloe as “princess socks” - and, since she got to pick out the shoes, she donned tap shoes with the metal torn out (Beca could only handle so much early morning tapping before even she had to start discouraging some of the arts). From where she sat at the breakfast counter, Chloe could barely see her behind the plate of waffles she set out for them to share. Beca stepped away from her redheaded masterpiece, throwing her hair up into a quick bun and looking at the clock. 

“I thought you said he wouldn’t mind if you were late,” Chloe said, watching Beca’s nervous glances. She looked up, as if noticing Chloe in the room for the first time. 

“Oh, yeah, no,” she said quickly, “I can show up whenever. He might not understand the whole ‘first day of kindergarten’ thing but he’d have to be  _asking_ for physical harm to not let me see my daughter off to school for the  _first time ever_ ,” she punctuated the last three words by shaking her daughter’s shoulders, earning giggles from the little girl as she moved like a rag doll under Beca’s movements. Chloe laughed too, leaning forward on the counter with a mug cradled in her hands. She was already dressed for work, donning her classic “first day” sundress - the one that even  _she_ admitted got all the students to be on her side from the get-go. ( “It brings out my eyes,” she said stubbornly when Beca questioned the tradition. “It brings out your ass,” was Beca retort, which earned her a quick slap on the arm). 

“Are you excited, Ladybug?” Chloe asked. The little girl pulled at her sleeve, chewing it through the fabric and assisting the hole that was already forming there. Chloe reached out slowly, taking the sleeve out of Piper’s mouth and holding the hand instead, like she always did with Beca. 

“This monster hardly slept a week last night, I bet,” Beca offered, scooting onto the counter next to the little girl. 

“Not enough sheep in the world,” Chloe agreed, but Piper just sat there, squeezing her mom’s hand. 

“Momma?” she said, looking up at Beca suddenly. Her voice was tiny, squeezed between the cracks of the conversation and hesitant to come forward. Beca reached out to run a hand over Piper’s cheek, leaning in to listen better. 

“What, Babe?” 

“Can I go to work with you instead?” 

Beca looked quickly up at Chloe, her eyes wide and uncertain. Chloe tugged at the corner of her lip, shooting Beca a glance that made Beca clear her throat. 

“Nah, kiddo, you gotta go to school,” she said, sounding almost as defeated as Piper looked when she gave an answer, head hung long enough to nearly get caught in the plateful of syrup. 

“Come on, Pipes,” Chloe offered, squeezing Piper’s hand tightly, “You love St. Josephs! It’ll be just like when I brought you in, only now you’ll have your own big girl locker!” 

“But I don’t want to be a big girl,” she argued. Beca reached out, rubbing a hand against the little girl’s back. Sometimes, she was so small that Beca was still afraid of crushing her. 

“I get it,” she said, finally moving her arm to Piper’s shoulder and pulling her in for a hug, “Being a big girl sucks butt sometimes. But, guess what?” 

“What?” 

Beca pulled away, looking Piper right in the eyes and pressing her forehead against the little girl’s. “You,” she said very seriously, “get snacktime.” 

“No veggies?” 

“ _NO veggies,”_ Beca answered. Her eyes were gleaming, and she was smirking out of the side of her mouth. “And guess what else?” 

“What, what?” 

“There’s a music class,” she said, her voice breathless. Across the counter, Chloe clapped, drawing Piper’s attention away for a moment. It was then that Chloe saw how the disinterest became excitement, the gaps between the little girl’s teeth showing with her smile. 

“Mom teaches it!” she said, pointing, and Chloe nodded excitedly, saying “Yeeahhhhh.” 

With that, Beca stood back up, pulling her tank top down and taking a deep breath. “Well, madame,” she started, eyes shooting to the clock again. “If I didn’t know any better, I would say you’re ready for kindergarten.” 

Piper looked with uncertainty between her moms, ending on Chloe, who was giving her the world’s biggest grin and a positive nod. She nodded once, curtly, in the way that Beca always did, and both parents clapped victoriously. Beca picked her up by the armpits, lifting her up and off the chair while making airplane noises. Once completely elevated, she let Piper collapse against her, stuffing her face with kisses as she held her tightly and spun her around. Piper giggled the whole time, and after a stream of 12 kisses (they counted out loud) followed by the three that punctuated “I” and “love” and “you”, Beca put her down, straightening out her sweatpants. Chloe put her hand protectively on the little girl’s head, combing down the flyaways. Grabbing the coffee on the counter, she leaned over and kissed Beca. 

“We’re off,” she said, her eyebrows rising. 

“Be the cool teacher for once, Chloe Beale-Mitchell,” Beca muttered, her eyes still closed. “For the sake of our daughter.” 

“Ugh,” Chloe whined jokingly, “The demands you make of me.” 

Beca chuckled, pulling away and eying Piper, who stood up to Chloe’s knee and waited patiently for a hand to hold. 

“Remember, the wisest words anyone will ever teach you,” Beca said seriously. “Snacktime.” 

Piper nodded again, and in a second, they were off. The carride was five minutes, but in that time, she’d received seven photos, one that ended with Piper donning a backpack that was nearly bigger than her entire body. She had her thumb stuck out, somewhat uncertainly, and the sun was shining in her eyes so that she was squinting. 

Beca laughed, pouring herself another cup of coffee and deciding that she would shower. Just one shower, and then she could call. 

Just to, like, make sure everything went okay. 

But, of course, the shower was five seconds long, and Beca was pretty sure she managed to not get a drop of hair wet before she hopped out to the sound of Titanium ringing from her phone. 

“Is everything okay?” she said hurriedly, avoiding niceties. On the other end was a lot of whooping and hollering, and a few locker slams, but above it all, she recognized Chloe’s cry-laughing. “Chlo? Chloe? What happened?” 

“–othin—” was Chloe’s answer, as she was speaking in terms of wheezing. 

“Okay, Chlo, deep breaths,” Beca said, standing dripping in the bathroom with her fingers tapping nervously against the sink. “Tell me what happened.” 

“Nothing!” Chloe finally managed, her voice a wail. From somewhere behind her, Beca heard a prepubescent boy shout, “Mrs. Beale-Mitchell is  _cryingggg”_ and Chloe’s quick response of “Yeah, so what? Everyone needs to cry sometimes”. 

She was  _such_ a teacher. 

“Okay, so why are you sobbing like a crazy person,” Beca said, still worried. Chloe sighed, and Beca could see her in the hallway lifting her eyes to the ceiling to stop the tears. 

“She’s gone, Becs,” Chloe said simply, her voice cracking. “This is it, this is the end. Because kindergarten becomes sleepovers and boyfriends and marriages and college scholarships and ohmygod our little girl isn’t ready for birth control and–”

“Whoa,” Beca said. The hand that was tapping on the sink stilled and flattened simply so she could catch her breath. Chloe words - and the images they conjured up - swirled around in her head and caused her to get dizzy. “Slow down, Chlo, slow down.” 

“Shoot, Beca, are you okay? You don’t sound well,” Chloe said. Beca scowled. 

“That’s because you’re talking about our daughter having sex, Chloe!” Beca screamed. 

“Shhh,” Chloe chided over the phone, “Not so loud. I’m positive Principal Muller just heard you.” 

“Fine by me. He’ll make the problem parent’s daughter drop out, and then everything will be fine and she won’t have sex ever, and we’ll all be happy,” Beca muttered. She moved so that she was sitting on the toilet seat, still trying to get some sense of balance. 

“Okay, so I was being dramatic,” Chloe admitted, “And so are you.” 

“That doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen,” Beca commented, “We can hope for a nunnery, but the chances of that are s–” 

“Becs,” Chloe said, “Becs, just, like, chill. I’m sorry I called. Everything’s okay. We’re okay.” 

“She’s okay,” Beca said, slowly so that they both could believe it. She heard Chloe’s nod. 

“She’s amazing,” Chloe answered, and Beca smiled, able to notice the floor again without feeling like she was spinning. 

“Thank you for her,” Beca said quietly. She was clutching her phone so hard that it was aching. 

“Thank  _you_ ,” Chloe responded, and they sat there for a few seconds, smiling into their phones to the sound of the junior high hallway. 

“Beca?” Chloe said to break it up. “I love you.” 

“I love you too,” Beca answered. “And I love her.” 

“Yeah,” Chloe smiled sweetly, “Yeah, so do I.” 


	16. The One With the Couch

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> *Offers basket of ingredients in case you want to make something* 1.) married!bechloe, 2.) their hand-me-down, super-comfy couch, 3.) a baby (not Emily), and 4.) their first family tv/game night. Fic-it if it doth pleaseth thee. Fluffily, PHE. :) — sent by anonymous

Chloe had a penchant for taking in strays - from showing up at the kitchen table with a scrappy cat to inviting the one and only nun from her faculty to dinner - and the couch was no exception. They’d found it on the side of the room two weeks after moving into their first apartment, which was small enough, really, for about two lawnchairs for furniture. It was soaking wet, floral printed, and entirely too big to fit in their car, but Chloe wouldn’t let it go. 

“What’s going to happen to it if we just leave it here?” she asked, hands on her hips as she stared down at the furniture. 

“I don’t know, Chlo, be thrown in the trash like most unusable inanimate objects?” 

“Beca,” Chloe shot back, “Have at least a half of a heart. Think about all this couch has seen…” 

“That’s exactly what we  _shouldn’t_ do if you want me to say yes,” Beca interrupted, but Chloe continued. 

“It’s been through so much…letting it just die off without a proper final act just isn’t fair. And besides…” she said, grinning, “It’s freeeeeee.” 

And if Chloe had a penchant for taking in strays, Beca had a penchant for free things. Which, of course, meant that any and everything offered to her without a financial transaction was something she would never turn down. 

That was how the couch, still stuffed in that tiny apartment, marked the strange and wonderful ebbs and flows of their relationship. It was there when they followed through on their classic Barden routine of nighttime television, and it was there when Beca forgot to pay the electrical bill, which was how the hot wax of a candle ended up staining the edge of a cushion. And when Chloe got that feeling that came every few years which told her she wasn’t doing anything right, there was a spot of chocolate ice cream on the armrest. 

The night that Beca sat in front of Chloe’s door, feet pushed up to her chest, to tell her that she loved her more than anything, and she wasn’t sure why it took her so long to realize it, the couch marked the moment with a splotch of maple syrup from the morning after. And when Beca was on bedrest - just a few weeks ago - the couch molded to her form so that when she finally stood up, there were distinct dents that refused to go away. 

So it was stained, faded, and tearing at the seams, but there was something about the couch that signified the home they’d somehow successfully made for themselves, and seeing Beca perched on the edge of it, feeding the baby in her arms carefully only enhanced that feeling of _rightness._ Like every single piece had fallen into the perfect place at the perfect time to create this moment where everything was safe and warm. 

Chloe sat down next to Beca, eying the red hair that wisped out from the baby’s head. Slowly, she reached out, running her hand over it. 

“Still can’t believe I gave birth to a ginge,” Beca muttered, looking up at Chloe with a smile. There were bags under her eyes, and she hadn’t showered in a few days, but if anyone asked Chloe when her wife was the most beautiful, she would without hesitation say right this instant. 

“You love the little mermaid,” Chloe argued, letting her hand rest on the baby’s head. Beca tutted, bouncing her head side to side. 

“Yeah, okay,” she said, “So that’s one ginger I like.” 

“Oh? Only that one, huh?” 

Beca shrugged. 

“I dunno I guess there are a few others that are okay. Maybe.” 

“Hmm yeah,” Chloe said, “I can think of a few.” 

She stood up then, kissing Beca on the forehead. “I’ve got plans,” she said, running into the bedroom. Beca turned only slightly so as to not disturb the baby, looking over the back of the couch. 

“Well your super hot wife knows nothing about these plans,” Beca said, and Chloe emerged from the room with something behind her back. 

“Yeah, I know,” Chloe said, “That’s ‘cuz they’re so wild and crazy I didn’t want to tell her.” 

“Oh really,” Beca said, shifting the baby so that she was resting on her shoulder. She started lightly patting the baby’s back, leaning into the couch. “I’m intrigued.” 

“You should be,” Chloe answered. She walked towards the TV, squatting down to put the DVD into the player. When she sat down next to Beca, the Disney logo was flashing across the screen. Beca looked at Chloe, rolling her eyes. 

“A movie?” she said, “ _Really_?” 

Chloe tutted. “Not just any movie,” she said, “This movie’s special. Wanna know why?” 

Beca sighed, preparing herself for whatever her wife had cooked up. “Why?” 

“Because,” Chloe said, sticking her feet in between the cushions, “This movie marks the first family movie night  _ever_.” 

“Oh no,” Beca said, “We’re not going to be those parents.” 

“Oh yes,” Chloe answered, prying the baby off of Beca’s shoulder once she was done burping her. Cooing once at the tiny human, she cradled her, pressing a kiss to her forehead, “We totally are.” 

Beca watched them all the while, smiling to herself. In the background, the opening song to The Little Mermaid started to play, but Beca ignored it, curling into Chloe’s side. “Hey, Babe,” she started, “If I say something corny, will you make fun of me for it.” 

“Depends,” Chloe answered. Beca sighed, snuggling in more. She’d hardly gotten enough sleep as of late, for obvious reasons, and was already starting to fall asleep. 

“Ariel,” she said, yawning, “Used to be my favorite princess.”

“Yeah…” Chloe said, urging Beca on. 

“But I think I’ve got two new redheaded princesses to bump her down a few spots.” 

“Hmm,” Chloe hummed. Her arm was propped up on the arm rest of the couch, supporting the baby’s head. “I like family movie night.” 

Beca made a noise to agree, already letting her eyes fall closed. And Chloe sat there, cuddled into the edge of the worn, old couch, with her baby in her arms. She thought she’d add Beca’s new drool stain as another landmark for the couch’s preservation of home. 


	17. The One With 10 Fingers and 10 Toes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Oh, I do like it when you write about Bechloe babies... -PHE — sent by anonymous

“Becs?” 

Her voice rang out through the silence of the room, dry and raspy with the taste of four am still echoing through it. She’d noticed Beca’s absence from bed almost immediately, despite reaching a state of exhaustion earlier that night that was previously unimaginable. Since the baby was born, they both became accustomed to sleeping with only half of their minds, dedicating the other half to open ears, just in case. Most nights “just in case” was guaranteed. 

Chloe sat up to glance at her clock. Two hours before wake-up, and the baby hadn’t cried once. 

“Beca?” 

She tiptoed out of the room, noticing the shadow that creaked across the hall. In any other, equally as sleep-deprived state, Chloe would’ve been worried about the dark figure hunched over her baby’s crib. Only Beca was sporting bright blue pajama pants with sheep scattered on it, and one of Chloe’s old tank tops. That, and her voice was clear enough even from where the redhead stood. She was counting, somewhat obsessively, sometimes in twos, and sometimes individually. Chloe knocked on the door lightly, so as not to scare her. 

“Hey,” she said slowly, creeping into the room. Beca glanced up quickly, her eyes wide despite the hour. “What’s up?” 

“Nothing,” Beca said quickly. She stepped away from the crib like she’d done something wrong, and Chloe crossed her arms, leaning over to check everything. The baby was curled up, one fist held up to her head as the other was clenched close to her chest. Her lips were puckered in the same way as Beca’s if and when her wife ever got to sleep, but her hair was already curling up and red. Chloe checked that all was good, then looked back up at Beca, an eyebrow raised. The silent question hung in the air until finally Beca sighed, looking up at the ceiling. 

“I got freaked when she didn’t cry,” she admitted, her thumb tapping lightly against the crib. She was avoiding Chloe’s eye contact. “She normally does right around, like, 3:23. Just to eat and stuff. So when she didn’t…” she shrugged, glancing over in the crib again. “I just had to check.” 

Chloe bit the inside of her cheek, her eyes adjusted enough to the darkness to see the embarrassment in Beca’s face. “And the counting?” 

Beca’s blush deepened. “I wanted to make sure she still had everything.” 

Chloe’s eyebrows furrowed. 

“Ten fingers. Ten toes. Etc.” 

The redhead couldn’t stop the smile that was spreading over her face, and any attempts at pushing it down proved to be almost painful. She glanced back down at the baby and then up at her very humiliated wife. With one hand reaching up to touch Beca’s cheek, she breathed out. “You’re adorable,” she said, stroking her thumb up and down on Beca’s jawline. Beca pouted into it. 

“This little chick’s made me weak,” she complained, and Chloe chuckled. 

“Hey,” she said, “I softened you up first.” 

Beca snorted, taking Chloe’s hand and squeezing it. “You two are going to kill me,” she said seriously, “With all your unintentionally making me panicked.” 

“What, do you need to count my fingers and toes too?” Chloe asked jokingly, earning a slap from Beca. She laughed, catching Beca’s palm mid-hit and wrapping it around her waist. “Love you,” she said quietly, and Beca pulled her closer. 

“Love you too,” Beca responded. Then, “Now please let’s go back to bed.” 

 


	18. The One With the Puppy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> puppies. babies. bechloe. go. — sent by scrawniest-calamity

It’s not that they weren’t thinking when they brought the puppy home after Beca’s eighth month check-up. It’s just that…they weren’t thinking. 

In Chloe’s defense, though, Beca, one month away from popping, was unstoppable in all her missions and completely controlled by her emotions. Thus, rationalizing any activity with her was an impossible task, and she wasn’t exactly going to say  _no_  to a tiny stray with a squeaky voice and pink paws. 

So she had a weak will. So what? 

The month was just enough to invite that pup into their house, welcoming him, and, eventually, developing a routine that made Chloe wonder what took them so long to adopt a tiny animal. Beca would remind her, time and time again, that what took them so long was countless and  _very_ expensive trips to the fertility clinic, but that was neither here nor there, because Winston was house-trained within a week, and liked to sit on Beca’s belly while Chloe made dinner. 

Ultimately, Chloe was grateful for her weak will, because she couldn’t have imagined a Beca Beale-Mitchell on bed-rest without having  _some_ kind of project to work on, and the project of Sir Winston was certainly enough to keep her occupied. Or, more importantly, relatively immobile. She watched them get closer and closer, until the dog refused to let Beca leave the room without following, no matter his level of current comfort and sleepiness. And Beca, too, who hated sharing a bed  _with Chloe_ almost physically fought the redhead when she expressed her fears that one of them would roll over Winston in their sleep and become a dog murderer. “There is no way in hell that dog isn’t sleeping with me,” she said, her eyes on fire, before Chloe raised an eyebrow and Beca muttered something about how it was only necessary because he helped her sleep better. 

He knew, before even Beca, when the baby was coming, barking at the edge of the bed until Beca shook Chloe awake, and while they wasted  _way_ too much time debating taking him to the hospital, they opted for dropping him off at Aubrey’s house and taking shortcuts to prevent Beca from giving birth in the front seat of a prius with a dog cage in the back. 

So, yes, they might not have considered the struggle of having to introduce a feral animal to a helpless, three-day old baby when they brought Winston home. But, as much as Beca was completely enraptured with all that was their new daughter, when Chloe mentioned Winston, showing her a picture that Aubrey had snapped, her eyes lit up and the three nights of sleeplessness completely disappeared from the bags under her face. 

Chloe read up on the internet while Beca slept between feeding rounds, and once they fell into a slight routine of generally living as zombies for the first week, they decided it was time. 

“Slowly,” Chloe said carefully, watching Beca opened the door to the house and hearing the tap-tap of the dog’s paws over the wood floor. “Let him in slowly.” 

“I know, Chlo,” Beca huffed, pulling the leash tighter. “He doesn’t like to be restrained.” 

“And I don’t think our daughter likes to be attacked…”

“He weighs less than she does!” 

“I don’t ca–” halfway through their argument, they realized that they were facing each other, which meant that Winston was at Chloe’s feet, and the fact that they hadn’t noticed that before meant that he hadn’t been barking. Not at all, in fact. Chloe slowly started to squat, holding the pile of blankets and cooes in her arms, until the baby was just close enough for the dog to sniff. 

“He’s doing it,” Beca said triumphantly, but Chloe shot a worried glare up at her, quickly standing up. 

“I think that’s enough for tonight,” she said determinedly, spinning on her heel to head into the kitchen. 

“Chlo!” Beca shouted behind her, “Come on, he was doing good!”

“Yeah, and I’m not risking it, Becs,” Chloe said. She put the baby into the baby carrier in the living room, spinning one of the toys and poking her stomach, resulting in a light giggle before heading back into the kitchen to warm up leftovers. Beca followed her. 

“They’re going to love each other,” she said, determined, “I mean, just wait, we have a viral sensation on our hands.” 

Chloe shot a look behind her, rolling her eyes. 

“I mean, he’ll have to get over being less cute than her, but, like, I think that’ll be overcomable and–”

“Beca,” Chloe said suddenly, her eyes scanning the floor. 

“What?” 

“Where is he?” 

Beca swore, earning a pointed finger that resulted in Beca claiming that their kid was not nearly old enough to understand four letter words starting with F before the panic set in. She’d set the leash down. Because she wasn’t thinking. Because she’d just had a baby. And because that baby wasn’t a big fan of sleep. 

That was her argument, which, it turns out, was a weak one, because Chloe was already near tears as she ran past Beca into the living room, her stride becoming impossibly long. “Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god oh my–”

Her persistent chant stopped suddenly, make Beca race as fast as she could behind her, popping her head out from behind Chloe’s back to see whatever was the source of so much panic. Then, she picked up Chloe’s words, this time saying them with less anxiety and more awe. Or…something. “Oh.” she started, one hand on Chloe’s wrist, “My. God.” 

The baby cooed lightly in her sleep, her head contentedly falling on the small dog’s bright pink chest. Somehow, Winston had found his way into her baby carrier, slipping between the edge and the baby’s small arm so that his head was snuggled into her neck and his ears were flopping around his eyes. The baby, in return, seemed to use his body as leverage, turning ever so slightly to get more comfortable, and then drifting off into the sleep that had been evading her for countless days. Chloe slapped Beca mindlessly, her eyes not tearing away from the duo. 

“Ow, what?”

“Not so loud!” Chloe whispered harshly. She pointed at the drawer. “Camera, now.”

“But I…”

“ _Now_.” 

Beca bounced, hopping over to the drawer and pulling the camera out without making a peep. When she reached Chloe again, the redhead had a hand over her mouth. Tapping her lightly with the camera, Beca grinned. “Okay, so I was wrong.” 

Chloe looked up at her questioningly. “They’re tied for cutest of the household.” 

Chloe hummed, then tutted. “I know I should be offended by that,” she said, smiling. “But I can’t bring myself to be.” 


	19. The One with Halloween Costumes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> C'mon, you must've known this one was coming... Baby Red's First Halloween: Baby Red - Pikachu (duh?), Beca - Ash, and Chloe - Nurse Joy. (Also, thanks for giving me a bit of a distraction. I'm totally awash in anxiety for the upcoming week, and the one who I couldn't stop thinking about some time ago totally blew me off again after a chance meeting. So. That's where I am with all of this.) - PHE — sent by anonymous

Beca balanced the baby on her hip, rocking it side to side as Chloe examined herself in the mirror. 

“No offense, Babe, but I’m kinda thinkin’ no one’s gonna have their eyes on you,” Beca said. The baby reached up, snatching the hat Beca had bought - and altered - in one swift motion. She groaned, flipping her to the other hip. 

“No offense, Babe,” Chloe said in the same tone from her mirror, “You’re cute but I don’t think you’ll beat me.” 

“No,” Beca said slowly. She had been walking up behind Chloe quietly, so that when Chloe finally looked away from her own reflection in the mirror, she was met with a tiny redhead, with the same greeting smile, wrapped up in fluffy yellow that Mrs. Beale had spent hours slaving over. “Your daughter will.” 

“Ohmy _God,”_  Chloe squealed, turning around to snatch the little one up immediately. She raised her up in the sky, nuzzling noses, before cradling the giggling girl in her arms. “Pika–”

“Chu!” Beca finished, wagging the finger that the baby’s whole fist was wrapped around. In a bubble of spit-giggles, the baby squealed, and Chloe used that moment to pull her even closer, in a hug so tight Beca fought the urge to tug at her arms so that the kid could breathe.  

“She’s perfect,” Chloe said finally, meeting Beca’s eyes. Beca reached up, pulling at one of the bobby pins that was loose and readjusting it. She finished by straightening the string that was holding Nurse Joy’s apron up, taking a step back to evaluate the work. 

Chloe and the baby had the same exact shade of hair and the same crooked smile, disturbed only by dark blue eyes that matched Beca’s. When she sneezed, her whole body moved, flipping the hood of the costume up and over her face. 

“Both of you are perfect,” Beca giggled, fixing the baby’s costume so that she could see, at the very least. The hat, which had been dropped at some point in the interaction, was picked up promptly and put tightly on Beca’s head. “Okay,” she said, determined. “We’re going to get some candy.” 

“But not before  _pictures_ ,” Chloe said excitedly. When the baby laughed, Beca rolled her eyes. 

“Well, she’s definitely your kid,” Beca mumbled, but her words were overrun by the sounds of Chloe and the baby playing peekabo with the oversized hood (a small baby, combined with a onesie that was already for the wrong age group, made for toes that were somewhere in the place where the knees should’ve been), the redhead shouting “Pikachu” in high pitched voices to the soundtrack of baby giggles. 

 


	20. The One With Panic

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pregnant Beca! So a few days before her due date, Beca and Chloe are out doing some pre baby shopping and Beca's water breaks in the store. She's super embarrassed and wants to clean it up but she's already starting to feel contractions and Chloe's freaking out because shes convinced the kid is gonna pop out in the store and they look like an absolute freak show in the store. — sent by anonymous

“Ugh,” Beca eyed the contraption that Chloe was holding up suspiciously. “I don’t even know what that’s supposed to be for.” 

“You act like you’re not nine months pregnant, Beca.” Chloe rolled her eyes. 

“Just because I’ve been a human submarine for nine months doesn’t mean I know what the hell is going to happen once this guy pops o—” Beca paused, wincing slightly. “Ow.” 

Chloe was standing at the end of the aisle, listening to Beca with half her mind and reading out the prices with the other half of her mind. Neither of them were terribly good at math - or budgeting for that matter - but she knew enough that the tiny socks situated strategically on the shelves were  _probably_ considered an “unnecessary purchase” and would be pitched out of the cart in seconds. 

It wasn’t really her fault for not registering the short burst of pain, because being married to Beca for some time - and knowing her for much longer - meant, in general, numbing oneself to the “ow”s that accompanied the tiny clutz of a person. It wasn’t until Beca’s hesitant, albeit a bit scared, voice rang out over the store’s xylophone lullabies that Chloe’s brain was alerted enough to look up. 

“Beca, shit,” Chloe said quickly, standing up straight again. “What did you spill? I swear to God, I didn’t even know you had a drink with you. This is why we don’t take liquid into public places, you don’t have the balance to keep it  _in_ the cup.” 

“Chloe, no,” Beca said through gritted teeth. She was holding her stomach, running her hands over it to smooth out the wrinkles in the oversized sweatshirt she’d thrown on that morning. “That isn’t….this….my water broke.” 

“Your….” Chloe still had half her mind over by the miniature socks - really, they had ones that were designed to be  _giraffes_ \- and while she could recognize the touch of frustration that her wife was throwing at her, she still had to sift through layers of thought before she finally reached the surface and understood exactly what Beca had said. “Oh my God.” 

“Yeah,” Beca said knowingly. 

“OhMy _God_ ,” Chloe repeated. Her fingers had gotten cold, and she was wondering if it was possible that her future child would have to grow up with one mom, forever hearing the tale of how her other mother died from a heart attack in the middle of a Baby’s R Us. 

“ _Yeah,”_ Beca said again, grimacing suddenly. “Shit.” 

“What? What’s happening?” she was suddenly by Beca’s side, one hand on her stomach, watching worriedly as the other woman’s face grew red. Beca, the ultimate complainer and queen of low pain tolerance, was very clearly hiding whatever was passing over her, and more than anything else, this was what sent Chloe into panic mode. “It’s a contraction. You’re having a contraction. God. This kid is going to be born in a Baby’s R Us. A Baby’s R Us! We had a  _plan_ , Beca! We had a birthing plan, and a doctor, and your suitcase is at home, and these floors are barely swept. Just imagine what kind of germs are on them, and  _God_ we’re going to be on the news.”

“The floors,” Beca said quickly, snapping her eyes open. “The floors! Shit, Chloe, we have to clean this up. Like, now. We have to….do you have any napkins in your bag?”

“Beca! We can’t clean this up, you’re having a baby,” Chloe said. She had to fight the urge to slap her wife, then, which she would allow herself to feel guilty for later. When Beca fell to her knees, Chloe’s gasp rang out over the rest of the store, drawing the attention of a store clerk. “Beca, are you okay? What’s happening? It’s coming, isn’t it?” 

“Help me clean this shit up, goddamnit,” Beca grunted, tugging at Chloe’s shirt. The redhead actually swiped at her hand then, stepping back. 

“We’re  _not cleaning up_ ,” she said, “You have to lie down. And, uh, take off your leggings. I’ve seen  _Knocked Up_ so, like, I got this.” 

Beca looked up at Chloe, her face reddening again as a bead of sweat fell from her forehead. Another contraction, Chloe thought, but this time Beca refrained from showing any sign of it other than by shooting an angry glare at Chloe, a growl almost on her lips. “You’re kidding me right now,” she said, “Chloe,  _Katherine Heigl is not going to be our birthing guide.”_

 _“_ Well we don’t have much of a choice!” Chloe squealed. She tried to tug at the hood of Beca’s sweatshirt just enough to pull her from the puddle that she was currently trying to mop up with a sock. “Beca, come on, push or whatever!”

“Jesus, you read like fifty baby books,  _how_ are you this unaware,” Beca shouted, turning to Chloe with a wet sock waving around her in hands. “Now are you going to help me clean this up o–”

“Excuse me, ma’ams,” a sales clerk stood hesitantly at the end of the aisle, where a small crowd had gathered around the entrance. A few even had their cell phones out, filming. “Can we help you?” 

“Yeah,” Beca and Chloe said in unison. Then, Beca, who was huffing again with the pressure of another contraction, reached her hand up to get Chloe to help her stand. “Clean-up on aisle four, please,” Beca said, wincing, earning nothing but a slap in the head from Chloe, who, yeah, assumed she’d be paying for that later. Both karmally and physically. 


	21. The Three Girls and Christmas

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bechloe + three little daughters is the greatest headcanon I've ever come across. PLEASE write more of it! — sent by anonymous

Beca’s eldest daughter inherited her overall apathy towards all the but two things. 

The first was passed down via Beca, because there was something about Chloe that _melted_ her daughter into a giggling, tickling, hugging mess of a six year old despite any and all attitude she dished out when Chloe was out of the room. 

The second was obviously passed down via Chloe, because while she tore bows out of her hair holiday after holiday, ripping tights and refusing to come down to dinner, she couldn’t resist Christmas. 

(A thing that Chloe reminded her wife when, one particularly rough year, Beca commented halfheartedly that her daughter didn’t just need to get coal in her stocking - she _deserved_ it. “We can’t do that to her,” Chloe said, her voice pleading, “It would _crush_  her.”) 

Of course, Beca’s second daughter was _all_ Chloe, down to the way she sang at the ass-crack of dawn to be freed from the confines of her room, which meant that Christmas for her was some magical time of the year when every mall Santa had to be visited - and reminded of the three dollars she donated to charity that season. 

And Beca’s third daughter was…well, she was less than six months old, so there wasn’t much by way of “Christmas spirit” in her aside from the goddamned Santa hat Chloe stuck on her head every time Beca turned around. 

The point was that Christmas in the Beale-Mitchell household, in what was really six years but had _seemed_ like twenty and one simultaneously, turned from a quaint day where neither Beca nor Chloe bothered getting dressed much less leaving the apartment into a _month_ of preparation, singing, decorating, story-telling, screaming and…

Really, the list could go on and on. 

It was just a massive event that Beca actually found herself excited for the 26th, when the tree would have to come down while the girls ate leftover Christmas cookies for breakfast…at least _then_ she’d have regained control of the radio station from those less refined palettes that required White Christmases and rocking to be had around the Christmas tree. 

So, on Christmas Eve, she slipped into bed next to Chloe, the baby already situated between the two of them _despite_ what all the parenting books - and their own pattern of raising children - suggested. (In their defense, the baby was sick. Sick and crying. Sick and crying and for God’s sake, it’s Christmas Eve, they’re allowed to save their baby from eternal night crying on _Christmas Eve_.) She was content and _almost_ ready for the crazed hazed that was going to be the next morning. So there was still one more gift to wrap? So what. She had survived another year in the house with three Christmas Chloes, and she was sure, at this point, that she could survive almost anything. 

Ah, but the glory of a good story is that right when a protagonist feels they’ve made it clear of the danger, conflict strikes again. This time, in the form of a miniature human, standing in the doorway of their room with a hand on the doorknob. “Momma?” she said, her voice piercing through the silence. 

“Shh,” Beca said, sitting up, “Don’t wake the baby.” 

“I can’t sleep, Mommy,” she said, somehow louder than before, and this time geared at Chloe, who shifted beneath the covers and held her arm out. 

“Why is that, babe?” 

“’Cuz Santa’s comin’,” the little girl said. In the shadow of the moonlight, Beca could make out the stuffed bunny that Aunt Aubrey had bought her when she was born. “And I’m,” she leaned in to whisper, “Too _excited_.” 

Chloe giggled, pulling the little girl in by the waist and moving her side to side. “I love you, you know.”

“I love you too, Mommy,” she said, laughing. Beca watched, scratching her forehead and smiling. 

There was something about the red hair and dark brown, the giggles still matching in pitch, that made the scene feel like a sort of miracle. 

Every second of every day was a series of moments that Beca never imagined for herself, and this was no exception. She now lived in a state of disbelief. 

So she reached over the baby, leaning her weight on an elbow, and tugged at the little girl, pulling her closer. “Hey, kiddo,” she said, “Hop in.” 

Scooting back, Chloe made room, and their second daughter slipped under the covers in the fuzzy pink christmas tree pajamas Chloe had bought for their oldest two years ago. She put a hand on the baby’s cheek, eyes wide, and said, “It’s her first Christmas, you know.” 

“I know,” Beca hummed, running her fingers through permanently knotted hair. “Close your eyes, bud. The baby’s not gonna sleep until you do.” 

The fact that there were two inches left between Beca and the edge of the bed was not important, because she saw her daughter close her eyes, purse her lips, and rest her head on her hands just like she did when she was a baby three years ago, positioned in the same place on their bed the night before Christmas. It was as if time had the power to stand still and hurtle forward, all at once. 

It took around twenty minutes for another light to come seeping into the room, this time the shadow was replaced by someone only slightly taller, with a bird’s nest on her head and a spark of mischief in her eyes. 

“Momma?” she said. 

Beca, upon seeing that shadow most days, had the instinct to be mad. About what, she was never really sure, she just always knew that when that particular label was applied to her by this particular child, it meant she had done something wrong. 

Only this time, it was soft. Sweet. Cushioned around the edges. Beca could hear the echoes of who her daughter once was - always mischievous, always rebellious, but smaller and cuter and capable of warming Beca’s heart instead of frustrating her to no end. She sat up again, being sure not to shift the baby. 

“What’s up?” 

“I can’t sleep,” she said simply, walking up to the side of the bed. Chloe was sitting, watching, and it was clear that when Beca looked at her, she closed her eyes to pretend. When Beca looked down at her second daughter, she saw her do the same thing. 

“Did you try?” 

“Of _course_ I _tried_ ,” she said, reaching out to fondle the covers anxiously. “Santa’s comin’, Ma. I can’t just _fall_ as _leep_.” 

She said it like she was exasperated that Beca couldn’t understand, and Chloe, despite the act she was trying to uphold, cracked a smile. 

“You’ve got to squeeze in,” Beca said after a moment’s consideration. She stood up from the bed, making room for her daughter between herself and her baby. The girl scooted in, curling around the baby with a hand on her shoulder. 

“All good,” she whispered, and Beca almost laughed, moving to lie back where she was. 

Now, there was virtually no distance between the edge of her back and the mattress. 

“Hey, kiddo,” she said, putting her head on her daughter’s shoulder, “Merry Christmas.” 

“It’s Christmas _eve_ , Ma,” she muttered back in reply, and Beca poked her side in frustration. 

“Not any _more_ , you goober. It’s past midnight.” 

“Oh,” the little girl said. She turned slightly to face Beca and put a kiss on her forehead, just like Chloe would. “Merry Christmas, Mommy.” 

Beca stuck her head up, then, making eye contact with Chloe, who had stopped pretending to be asleep. There was a smile on her face wider than most Christmas mornings, and over their three children, Beca rolled her eyes. 

 _You love it,_ Chloe said with her mouth, earning a quick head shake from Beca. _You totally do_. 

Beca reached up, pincher fingers in position as if to communicate “just a wee bit”, and Chloe let out a breathy laugh. With that, Beca’s hand fell, reaching out over the children to find Chloe’s waist. 

“Love you,” Chloe sighed into the silence. To whom she was talking, no one was sure, which was why all of them - with the exception of the baby - responded in various levels of exhaustion, “Love you too” before everyone fell asleep, the little girls all slipping headlong into their unconsciousness so fervently that when Beca and Chloe woke up at five to set the presents out, they didn’t notice. 

In fact, one might say with a cheeky grin that once they were all together, tucked tight in bed…

On the night before christmas, all through the house

Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. 


	22. The One With the Shy Daughter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> How about taking a break from the christmas prompts and doing a bechloe fic where they have a shy teenage daughter (pretty much a mini beca) and they have to deal with moving and her making friends and adjusting. (Kinda going through this now) — sent by anonymous

“It doesn’t matter what she’s _really_ like, Chlo,” Beca said, pulling back the covers on their bed. “If no one _sees_ that…”

“I’m just saying, it’s not like it has anything to do with her,” Chloe said. She slipped into the bed, propping up her pillow and pulling out the book lying on the nightstand. “She’s just….It’s just…”

“Hard,” Beca finished. She moved to rest her head on Chloe’s arm, sighing. “I know.” 

They had moved a month ago - well, a month, a week, and three days, but their daughter _hadn’t_ been counting…not at all - and both the mothers noticed a massive shift in their daughter’s behavior. 

She was shy, always had been, and Chloe had a habit of looking at her like she was looking at a kitten who hadn’t been picked out at an adoption center throughout the years because of her inability to comprehend the feeling of being unable to talk to people. Playdates were spent with her sitting on Beca’s lap twirling her hair instead of actually playing, and they had been to numerous parent-teacher conferences where the teacher expressed a desire to see her talk “a bit more”. 

It hurt Beca too, only because she understood all too well how it felt to walk into a room and recognize just how small it felt to be….present at all. 

So they knew that when Chloe got the job offer at the private school to renovate their arts and music program, it was going to be an issue for her. 

“That’s fine,” she had said when Beca and Chloe had told her about the move. There was a drop in her face, the kind that implied she was waiting for the right moment to stand behind the door and start crying. 

“Are you sure?” Beca said, reaching out to squeeze her hand. 

“I can…like, _not_ take the job too. This is a _joint_ decision,” Chloe said. 

“No,” their daughter said quickly, “No no no. You can’t. Really. It’s fine. It’ll be fine.” 

Chloe had convinced herself, though, that this was going to be a learning experience for the girl - a life lesson that everyone had to endure, eventually leading to her daughter finding herself or something along those lines. Beca had convinced herself that it was good that she had a safe place to come home to - because when it happened to her, she didn’t really have a house at all, or, at least, a family available to help her with it all. 

But at the end of the day - or, in this case, at the end of one month, one week, and three days - they couldn’t deny that their daughter was struggling. She’d been sick seven days in the time since they moved, and not once was it faked. In fact, the sincerity behind her sickness made Chloe stay up most nights. When they asked Stacie about it - hey, she had her doctorate in medicine, yeah? - she said that her stomach-aches were stress related, the headaches a direct result of needing to cope with the shift.

There were only so many ice cream nights and movie days that they could spend with each other before Beca and Chloe had to come down to the realization that they weren’t “enough” for their daughter to get through the adjustment. 

She needed more. People her age. Hobbies. _Something_ , at least, to make her feel…well, alive. 

Chloe tried to talk to her about it, complete with a whole list of possible options for her to…get involved. 

“And if that doesn’t work we can try summer camp,” Chloe said, “Oh! Or theatre! You can _totes_ try theatre. That could do wonders, and you know you’ve always had the most beautiful voice.” 

“Mom,” the girl said, scratching her forehead in a way that always mirrored Beca perfectly. “That’s not…this isn’t….” 

“Baby,” Chloe said, reaching out to push back a strand of hair. “I know it’s hard. But it’s going to get better.” She smiled, then, wide and hopeful in a way that nearly broke her kid’s heart. “I know it will. You’re too amazing for it not to.” 

It was sweet, really, and the younger girl appreciated it, because she could see just how much it hurt Chloe that she was struggling. Disappointing her was possibly the scariest thing that the daughter could imagine, and frankly even the conversation - the tone that Chloe took on, the way she had to look at her - was enough to make her feel…panicked, almost. Or, at the very least, _sick_. 

At the core of it, the redhead just…didn’t get it. Couldn’t understand the concept of going to a new place and _not_ instantly meeting people. It wasn’t as simple as trying harder, or getting “out there”. Because how could she even start? Where even was “out there”? 

Chloe might’ve seen the thousands of options in front of her, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t even really see her own feet at the bottom of the pool anymore. 

So when Beca walked into her room the next day, she prepared herself for a similar conversation. 

“Hey, kiddo,” Beca said, knocking lightly on the door the next mid-afternoon when their daughter hadn’t come out of her room most of the morning. “Just checking in.” 

“Hey,” she said from behind her computer screen. 

“You doing alright?” 

“Fine.”

“Yeah? You haven’t been out. I know…I get caught up in that world -” Beca gestured at the computer - “Too so…I want to make sure you, like, eat and stuff.” 

“I will,” she answered, still not looking up. 

“Hey, um, can I talk to you?” 

Slowly, Beca started to close the computer screen, sitting on the end of the bed lightly. 

“Mom already talked to me, Ma,” she said, sighing heavily. She finally dared to look up at Beca, and it was then that she noticed Beca looked….different than her other mother. 

Because Beca wasn’t looking at her with pity. Or hurt. Or any kind of merciful expression. She was looking at her with the same kind of pained expression that suggested that she didn’t want to be having this conversation just as much as her daughter. 

“Yeah, but Mom doesn’t really, like, get it,” Beca said, wincing. “I mean. She tries. But…this sucks. Doesn’t it?” 

The little girl looked at her feet, picking lint from the sock and leaning her cheek against her knee. She shrugged. “I guess. I don’t have much of a choice.” 

“That doesn’t mean it can’t suck,” Beca said. “Cuz it does.” 

She reached out, putting a hand on her daughter’s knee and rocking it back and forth slightly. “It really sucks,” her daughter breathed, closing her eyes. “It really sucks, Ma.” 

“I know.” 

“I don’t know how to make it better.” 

She heard her mother sigh. “I don’t know either.” After a pause, Beca scooted back on the bed, putting her arm on her daughter’s shoulder. “The thing is, it’s allowed to suck. I want you to….I want you to tell us when it sucks. And how much it sucks. If that makes sense.” 

The little girl leaned into Beca’s arm, resting most of her weight there. “Yeah.” 

“I just…don’t hold it in,” Beca said. “Tell us. Talk to us. And we’ll figure it out. Because the change happens….It happens so slowly that you won’t even realize it. That sounds fake, but it’s not. It’s gradual and it’s small and then one day you wake up and realize that this is your life and you’ve moved into it and it’s not as hard as it used to be. And that’s why when I say it’ll be okay, I mean it. You won’t realize it, but it’ll be okay.” 

“You think?” 

Her daughter’s voice was so small, squeezed into a bottle and let out slightly piece by piece. Beca squeezed her tighter. “It happened to me.”

“Because of Mom…”

“I hated it at first, you know,” Beca said, and her daughter snorted slightly. 

“I know, you tell me all the time.” 

“I’m just telling you that it sucked and then it didn’t and then I got married to a hot girl and had you….” 

“Happily ever after,” her daughter said, sighing. She pressed her forehead into Beca’s arm, taking a deep breath. “Right.”

“Right. And hey…in the mean time….you’ve got some cool moms,” Beca poked her daughter’s cheek, nuzzling until she started laughing lightly. “There’s the smile.” 

“Shut up,” her daughter said, shrugging her off only causing Beca to squeeze her tighter. 

“Like mother like daughter,” Chloe said lightly from the doorway, drawing both of their attention. She was leaning against the door, arms crossed, her smile wider than anyone else’s in the room. 

“That,” Beca said, pulling away to make some room for her wife on the twin bed. “Is what they say.” 


	23. The Christmas Fire

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> So I built a fire last night and it was really awesome and made me think of a prompt: Bechloe as parents. Beca is teaching one of the kids how to build a proper fire and accidentally burns her hand. She was afraid to face Chloe and endure the wrath because she was going to have to spend Christmas Eve in the hospital. So she tries to hide it at first but gets caught when her own kid rats her out. — sent by justaroundthatriverbend

She always thought the line “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire” was dumb and antiquated. 

If you wanted chestnuts (who ever wanted chestnuts) you could go to the store and buy a tin of them that was explicitly labelled “ _Roasted”._

But what was once simple frustration with that line became utter hatred, because in the years after the Christmas Eve spent in the hospital, Chloe and the kids took an _obnoxious_ amount of joy in changing the lyrics to that song to describe Beca’s indescribable suffering. 

All she had wanted to do was roast marshmallows. There was a plan, actually, and it was too adorable for Beca to ever willingly admit to when she went to the bar a week later with Jesse. Basically, three marshmallows on a stick made a snowman, and while it might be a tad morbid to _roast_ Frosty, she never much liked plain marshmallows. So a golden snowman would’ve been their snack-time endeavour while Chloe “visited the North Pole”, complete with a fire-safety tutorial. Two birds, one stone. 

Oh, the irony of that one. 

The thing was, Beca and fire never got along too well. There was the incident in her chemistry class her junior year of high school where she very nearly singed her eyebrows off, and the moment she left a scented candle too close to the horrendous curtains Amy had picked out (9 out of 10 Bellas agreed later that this one was on purpose). She didn’t even really know how to use matches properly, and the years of fire-related accidents made her so paranoid that she blew them out every time she got them lit. 

So the lesson in fire safety was partly for the kids, and partly for herself. There was no issue with that. 

“You’re taking a long time with that,” her daughter said, leaning against the corner of the counter. Her bow had slipped down her hair so that it was nearly at the base of her neck, leaving the bird’s nest of curls free to frizz, one of Chloe’s biggest pet peeves. 

Turns out, the oldest daughter had hair like Chloe and a personality like Beca, meaning that every ounce of the six year old’s vocabulary was fueled with sarcasm - a feat that both mothers didn’t think was possible. 

“I know,” Beca huffed. She squatted, eye to eye with the empty fireplace. There was burning, sure, but it was mostly just in the joints of her legs. 

“You could let me do it,” the little girl sang, and Beca only glared back. She had asked a total of five times since they started the activity, and while Beca’s resolve was melting, she knew that if her oldest daughter had inherited most if not _all_ of Beca’s personality, then fire wouldn’t be a good thing to put in her hands. 

Because despite every single fire-related incident in Beca’s life, she was kinda sorta completely mesmerized by the concept, and that kind of pyro-hypnotism in a six year old was a little more than dangerous. 

A loud scream erupted from behind them, and quickly, Beca turned to look. With wide-eyes and a mouth tugging down at the edges, her second daughter tried to wear the most innocent face she owned. “I’m tryna hold her,” she said, her voice high-pitched and near tears. In her arms, the six-month old was sliding quickly so that the footed pajamas were stretching out at the toes and her neck was creeping into her face. 

“Okay,” Beca said, sighing. She scooted over to the two girls, taking the baby quickly and hoisting her up on her hip. 

“I was only trying to help,” the little girl said, tears forming in her eyes, and Beca nodded, keeping her jaw set. 

It had been, to say the least, a very long morning. 

Only, despite her dark brown hair, her second daughter was almost entirely Chloe, right down to the way she sang in her room at five in the morning until someone came to “wake” her up. Her intentions most of the time were based in complete innocence, and there was a shake to her bottom lip in moments like this when she thought she disappointed her mother that made most of Beca’s frustrations or angers dissolve. Sighing again, Beca patted the little girl on the head. 

“It’s okay,” she said in her most placating voice. “You’re okay.” 

By the time she looked back at the fireplace, she realized in large part what her mistake had been. 

A six year old who acted like a thirteen year old most days shouldn’t be left alone with a box of matches. Just, like, a note to the reader. 

Screeching, she lunged forward, performing an impossible mechanism of action that she was sure, upon later reflection, was just the maternal instincts she never knew developed coming into play. With the baby tucked further away from the area of danger, she had one free hand, and mindlessly, she reached out with it, grabbing the lit match and only registering the sizzle that resulted before the pain set in. 

Her eldest daughter had, at that point, stepped back, eyes wider than usual, which was as close as she would ever get to admitting guilt. 

“Fuck,” Beca hissed, dropping the burnt match as soon as she realized what she did. “Shit.” 

“You shouldn’t swear,” her oldest said, arms crossed. 

Beca was never one for discipline, nor was she someone who enjoyed forgiving the mistakes of her own childhood, but she swore to God if she was _anything_ like her oldest daughter, she was lucky to be alive. 

“Mommy?” her younger daughter said hesitantly, peeking out from around the baby, who hadn’t moved at all and was in the process of consuming her own hand. “Are you alright?” 

“Fine,” Beca grumbled between closed teeth. She put the baby down carefully and stomped to the other room. With a hand under cold water, she let out a sigh that sounded more like a hiss. 

“Do you need a band-aid?” the little girl offered, and Beca spun around to see her daughter holding her plastic first-aid kit carefully in her hands. “I can play nurse.” 

Taking a deep breath, Beca looked back down at her hand. It was shaking, and it was starting to get numb in all the pain. “Really, sweetie, I’m fine,” she said, her voice sickly sweet. “Get out your crayons, you and your sister can color for a bit while I handle this.” 

They were thirty minutes into coloring before Beca carefully took her hand out of the stream of water, letting the air burn the mark left on her palm. The two little girls at the counter watched her carefully, making faces at the mark that was left behind by the match. Beca closed the hand into a fist before they saw much more, and grimaced through the pain that that brought up. “Girls,” she said in an unnaturally high pitch. “We’re just gonna…we’re just gonna keep this between us, okay?” 

The girls nodded, mouths closed. “It’s not a secret,” Beca continued, “It’s just a favor. We don’t want Mom to spend Christmas Eve trying to make _me_ better…”

“She’d miss Santa Claus,” the younger daughter said in agreement, standing on her knees to spin around on the chair. “And Santa Claus is her favorite.” 

“Right,” Beca said pointedly. With her good hand, she stopped the chair from spinning, and the little girl gave a few extra “whoas” before she steadied herself. “So, our Christmas favor?” 

She held out her pinky, waiting for both little girls to grab it with theirs. When they did, she smiled. “Great.” 

If you didn’t catch it by now, I feel it’s my responsibility to remind you that Beca and Chloe’s oldest daughter liked making trouble. 

Actually, she liked making trouble solely for Beca. The brunette was somewhat convinced that despite carrying the little monster, _Chloe_ was the one she’d imprinted on. (Chloe reminded her constantly that that wasn’t how babies worked, but it didn’t stop Beca from making the argument…). With the redhead around, she was an angel. 

And when there was an opportunity to both provide trouble for Beca and be an angel for Chloe, you better bet that that little girl was going to take it and milk it for all it was worth. So when Chloe arrived home and finished her scurry up the stairs with bags upon bags of gifts, their oldest daughter skipped up to her, jumping onto her lap with a spritely innocence that almost made Beca wince. 

“Mom, guess what?” 

“What?” Chloe asked, amused by the energy in her daughter’s eyes. Her forehead was pressed against the little girl’s and her hands were positioned perfectly for tickling, should it prove necessary. 

“We tried to build a fire today.” 

Beca, who was stationed at the kitchen counter on her laptop, looked up quickly, eyes wider than her daughter’s had been earlier that day. She kept an eye on the conversation happening on the couch, biting her lip. 

“You _did_?” Chloe asked, looking up at Beca, who only offered a weak, nervous smile. “And did Mommy do a good job?” 

“Not really,” the little girl said. She hopped once on Chloe’s lap, and Beca _swore_ later that she looked at Beca in that moment and laughed quietly. This, though, could just be Beca’s mind and it’s tendency towards drama. Leaning closer to Chloe’s ear, the little girl held up her hand, and in a stage-whisper said, “She burned her hand.” 

“What?” 

Chloe was standing within a few seconds, somehow managing to drop the little girl lightly on the group. Within a few more seconds, she was at the counter, closing Beca’s laptop with a snap. 

“It’s not really a big deal,” Beca said weakly, hands behind her back. “It was just a small little accident, and I didn’t want t–”

Chloe held her hand out, staring at it, waiting for Beca to present the injury, which Beca - not wanting to get into any more trouble - did quickly. 

The mark had gotten redder, clearly inflamed, and Chloe gasped when she saw it. 

“What the heck, Beca!” she squealed, “You can’t just…You aren’t…This is….”

“It’s not a big deal!” Beca said quickly. “It doesn’t even h–Ow! Fuck!” 

Chloe had poked the mark harshly, her cheeks already red. “Don’t even _try_ to tell me that doesn’t hurt, Beca. And don’t swear!”

“Sorry, you jus–”

“Get up,” Chloe said, reached to the island to grab her purse. 

“Where are w–”

“The hospital,” she said without waiting to see if Beca was following her. “Put the kids in the car.” 

“But the…the presents and the movie and–”

“Can wait,” Chloe said resolutely, spinning around once she reached the front door. Her jaw was set, her eyes on fire, and she looked like she was going to slam her fist into the wall. In one breath, though, all of that melted, and she softened just enough to grab Beca’s shoulders. “You have three kids. Which means that when an accident happens, you need to fix it.” 

Beca opened her mouth to talk, but Chloe silenced her with a finger. 

“Ignoring things is dumb, Beca.” 

“I wasn’t ignoring it, I just was waiting until after Christmas so that you cou–”

“Hey,” Chloe said, pulling at Beca’s shoulders. “I like my wife with hands, for reasons I’m not going to explain right here and right now with an audience of children around. So, if you really want to make my Christmas special, you’ll agree to take care of yourself by going to the ER, because there are plenty of Christmas gifts you can give me that involve _not_ having your hand be amputated for something stupid.” 

“It doesn’t need ampu–”

“You’re not _listening_ ,” Chloe said, her voice going quieter at the end of the sentence. She tilted her head slightly, like she was sharing a secret between them, and Beca recognized it as the look she had to tone down ever since the kids were old enough to take in the things that they did around each other. She flexed her hand once, wincing, and nodded. 

“Right,” she said. “Okay.” 

Chloe nodded too, letting go of her shoulders in favor of picking up their three year old and perching her on her hip. 

“Let’s go, troops,” she said, “We’ll search for some candy canes in the giftstore, yeah?” 

The concern was sweet, really, if a bit overdone, though Beca would’ve longed for it in the later years when the image of her sitting on a bed with her arm wrapped up as the little girls ran between the nurse’s legs was considered just another holiday joke pinned around her suffering. 


	24. Baby's First Christmas

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> PHE-rompt: *Stage whispers to the point of wheezing* Baby's first Christmas! *Skitters away.* - Fluffily, PHE — sent by anonymous

Logic, it seemed, escaped almost every aspect of every Christmas tradition according to Chloe Beale, and Beca knew this from years and years of celebrating the holiday with the redhead. 

Tradition came first. Questions came later. And, above all, Santa as you may well know, came too - once a year, which was, in Chloe’s mind, the most important part of the holiday. 

So Beca accepted the reindeer pajamas that Chloe wore the entire day and night of Christmas Eve (she did this on Christmas Eve eve, too, but Beca didn’t want to validate that holiday), just as she’d accepted the fact that night after night in December she would be climbing in bed with an adult that was wearing Christmas tree long johns. 

Being locked out of her own bedroom - the bedroom that conveniently held the _only_ pacifier in the entire house - was something that Beca accepted considerably less.

“No!” Chloe screeched, racing to hop up out of her cross-legged position and reach the door before Beca could come in. “She can’t be in here!” 

“Chl–”

“No,” Chloe said resolutely. “No babies allowed.”

“It’s funny,” Beca muttered, “That I’m carrying a creature incapable of holding her head up, and I only see one child between the three of us.” 

The door opened an inch so that Chloe could peek her head out and glare at Beca.

“I don’t want her to know about S-A-N-T-A,” Chloe whispered harshly. “And I’m currently wrapping G-I-F-T-S.” 

Beca rolled her eyes, shifting the baby to put the weight on the other side of her body. Awake just enough to watch contentedly, the baby just lolled, head rested effortlessly on the washcloth Beca had draped over her shoulder for emergencies.

“She doesn’t understand English, Chlo.”

“She’s ahead for her age,” Chloe sniffed. She was standing outside of the room now, arms crossed and stance determined. 

“She’s less than six months old,” Beca argued. But Chloe didn’t budge, chin up and chest out. “Fine,” she grumbled. “We’ll be downstairs whenever you’re done with _Santa_.”

Chloe squeaked. “Santa’s not in here!” she shouted as Beca walked down the steps towards the living, “For the record, he’s at the North Pole!”

She would yell at Beca for the middle finger that was held out as a response at a later date. 

The truth was, Chloe was being good. On her best behavior, really - not that Beca wanted to quell the adorableness of Chloe’s Christmas spirit, but there were times where her enthusiasm could be…overwhelming. The baby was _just_ beginning to think they were cool, Beca joked the day after November, and it wasn’t like she wanted to throw that out because of some craving for red and green. 

It should be noted that the baby didn’t much care, because she was much more preoccupied with the light-up bells hung up on the Christmas tree and the way they always rang out a Christmas carol every three hours on the dot. Beca wasn’t sure if she ever stood in front of a Christmas tree as long and as frequently as in that first Christmas. No one could claim that the baby _wasn’t_ Chloe’s, given the fact that she only ever stopped crying when those songs were being played from that mechanism. 

They finished the night watching a stop-motion film during which Beca spent most of the time questioning plot validity, and Chloe, in her rushed, flushed state of holiday cheer, managed to cook up _another_ batch of cookies between putting the baby down and their own bedtime (a time that had been moved up considerably in the past few months, though Beca would never admit to no longer being a night owl). 

“When we wake up, it’s going to be _Christmas_ ,” Chloe squeaked as Beca got into bed. 

“It’s already Christmas,” Beca tried, pointing to her phone of the nightstand. “Past midnight.” 

“You know what I _mean_ ,” Chloe huffed, fluffing her pillow one more time. “It’s her _first_.”

“So I’ve been told,” Beca said, “Christmas with the Beale-Mitchells part one.”

Chloe smiled, already closing her eyes. “Christmas with the Beale-Mitchells part one,” she repeated, sleepily, her voice more of a whisper-sigh than anything. 

It was the only time Beca had seen her still all week.

Which was why it was surprising when, only a few hours later with the rust-red of the outside street lamps snuck into the room scattered in the snow dust that was falling, Beca woke up to a cold side of the bed. 

“Chlo?” 

She was up and out of the bed before she called out for her wife a second time, the hardwood chilling her feet and pushing her towards the closet for another layer of sweats. 

They had a baby now, so waking up to an empty bed wasn’t the most shocking thing in the world anymore. Only, most of the time Beca could at least hear the catalyst for Chloe’s sleep disturbance, and she was pretty sure the house had been silent for the entirety of the night - one of the first nights, actually, when this phenomenon occurred. 

So she tip-toed out of the room, not because she wanted to be quiet but because the floor was too cold to embrace fully, and it was just dark enough that she didn’t notice the fact that the _ridiculous_ pile of presents was gone from their room. 

(She fought against buying that many things for a little girl who, thus far, had no concept of material items, but then Chloe squealed and showed her socks that were smaller than her own hand and, begrudgingly with a slight smile on her face, she waved it off. When the socks came in the mail, she would be lying if she said she didn’t hold them in her hand for a while, smiling to herself. She would be lying, yes, but…she never had much of an issue twisting the truth.) 

Upon leaving the room, she sighed the kind of sigh that relieved her of tension she didn’t even know she was feeling. The house was bathed in that same rust-red street lights from the windows, only there was a hazy brightness to it, too, that came with the Christmas lights strewn around the banister and out onto the Christmas tree in the middle of the living room. It made the edges of everything soft, frayed like the ends of old pictures where smiles seemed more genuine than reality could produce. 

She thought, briefly, that it almost, somehow, tasted like sugar cookies. The air. It tasted like sugar cookies. 

Walking down the steps, the sound of Chloe’s voice began to rise up. It was soft - softer than Beca was used to hearing it - not because Chloe was trying to lower her volume but because - and Beca became certain of this once she heard a slight giggle from her daughter - Chloe was talking to their baby, and she always did so in a way that implied her voice could have the power to _break_ her. 

She was weaving in and out of Christmas carols, the slow, lulling kind, and there was a creak to the rocking chair that Aubrey had gotten them right as Beca was about to pop a few months ago. The rhythm matched the tune, though occasionally Chloe would interrupt by saying something to the little girl and poking her stomach or brushing down the red peach fuzz lining her head. 

When Beca made it all the way downstairs, she was able to see Chloe fully, still wearing her two-piece reindeer pajamas, _glowing_ as the light of the Christmas tree outlined her shape. She looked up the minute Beca’s foot hit the last step, and the smile on her face spread from ear to ear. 

She would ask Chloe later how, exactly, she managed to make her cheeks perfectly pink so that she resembled one of those characters from the Grinch. She assumed in that moment that it had something to do with the Santa hat on her head or the striped socks she was wearing. 

Their daughter, curled tightly in a ball and flat out  _resisting_ the sleep that she was supposed to be doing in that very moment, was wearing a pair of miniature antlers, her onesie striped like a candy cane. 

“Baby,” Chloe whispered, her voice like candy, into the ear of their daughter. “It’s time for Christmas.”

“It’s not even _dawn_ yet,” Beca said quietly, walking closer to her wife. Chloe just pursed her lips in a smile, her eyes sparkling. 

This was her holiday, and she was currently going through the calculated process of making it _their_ holiday, and Beca could _see_ in Chloe’s face the kind of unbridled joy that came not from following an old tradition but from starting a new one. So she sat down on the arm of the rocking chair, legs slipping so that her feet were stuffed in the crease between Chloe’s thigh and the seat. She kissed Chloe’s forehead, reaching out to touch the baby’s. 

“We waited up for Santa,” Chloe explained, “The lil’ guy just couldn’t _wait_ until morning.”

“Oh really?” Beca raised an eyebrow. The baby’s eyelids were getting heavier and heavier by the second, and it was clear enough that she had no idea why, after all the months of being forced onto a sleeping schedule, this was happening. 

Chloe nodded. “She missed the visit, you know, but we think we might’ve seen the reindeer,” she explained very seriously. Beca pursed her lips to keep from chuckling. 

“It’s snowing,” Beca tried, and Chloe’s smile spread even wider. 

“It’s _perfect_ ,” she answered so quickly and fervently that Beca’s heart lept at the second hand excitement. “Now. Reach over there….no….behind the tree a little bit? Yes.” 

Beca was fighting gravity at the moment trying to reach as far back as she could, but she managed to get the small box that put the definition of the term “wrapped” into question. It was covered, that was certain, but it was nearly completely covered in tape, and the paper was so crinkled that at corners, it was clear where there had been tearing. Beca held it up. 

“Beautiful wrapping,” she commented, only getting a shove from Chloe. 

It was the one thing, hilariously enough, that Chloe could _not_ do. She’d been watching Youtube tutorials that year. 

They hadn’t gone as planned. 

“Open it,” Chloe said.

Beca thought that there were series of moments when time slowed down. The moment she walked down the aisle, her head focused on her steps until she finally decided to look up. It took hours for her to lift her chin, until she finally say Chloe, standing on the other end, eyes so blue from tears that Beca thought if she passed out it was the only thing that would remain after the black-out. There was, too, the moment she sat in the hospital waiting room, Chloe having been wheeled in an hour before, a bump just beginning to form. Then, so closely after that, the way the pregnancy test _glowed_ hot pink, and the warm feel of the door knob as she made the move to walk out and tell the woman waiting in their bedroom what she’d “been up to in there”. 

There were hundreds of these moments, stretching from an extended gaze at an activities fair that seemed to shock her heart into living again, or the first time their baby yawned, hands in tiny fists of energy against the heaviness of the world. 

This, she would remember, was one of them. The slow creep of her thumb underneath the tape, and the tear that resulted from her careful opening. The way that Chloe hummed - buzzed, actually - as the baby gave into her base desires for sleep. 

It was a rattle, made of homemade clay and the end of a candy cane stick, admittedly lopsided and imperfect, particularly when it came to the globs of paint that spelled out - messily, but still in Chloe’s scrawl - “Baby’s First Christmas”. 

“I made it with the extra supplies from the class holiday craft,” Chloe said, “So it’s not…”

“Beautiful,” Beca said quietly. “It’s beautiful.” 

“Nothing to open an etsy store for,” Chloe relented, and Beca barked out a laugh, spooking the baby into wakefulness again. “But I looked and looked for the right ornament, and none of them were…right.” 

Beca nodded, hand running over the harsh edges of the clay where it splinters and cracked in the oven. “May I?” 

“My hands are a bit full,” Chloe relented, and Beca chuckled again. Reaching out so that she wobbled a bit on the chair, she put the ornament carefully on a branch, grunting as she did so. It stood next to a bulb from the string of lights so that it almost sparkled. 

Beca didn’t say anything else. She was tired, and when she was tired she lost any ability to be eloquent. Instead, she just slipped from the armrest to the side of Chloe’s lap, curling up slightly and resting her head on the opposite shoulder so that she could see every curve of her baby’s small head. She reached out, poking the little girl’s cheek and smiling when the baby responded with a smack of her lips. Chloe’s free hand found Beca’s head, brushing through the hair.

“Merry Christmas, baby,” Beca said quietly to the little girl as Chloe pressed a light kiss to her temple. 

“Merry Christmas, wife,” Chloe said in the same tone, so that Beca breathed out a small laugh that became an easy sigh. 

They talked, then, about going upstairs and getting a bit more sleep before the sun came and, with it, familial obligations. 

However, they never managed to make it out of the chair, Beca’s eyelids getting just as heavy as her daughter’s seemed to be. 

She got it, then. 

She understood. 

Maybe not the hubbub of Christmas, or the reasoning behind Chloe’s antics, but instead the feeling of knowing that you’re beginning something that is going to last - you’re creating something with a sense of permanency that makes you feel safe, secure, but still humming with excitement for the promise of everyday. 

She got it. Tradition. The feeling behind it, and the reason it structured so much of her life since marrying Chloe Beale-Mitchell. 

It meant family, a thing she hadn’t had until now. It meant memory, a thing she hadn’t valued until this moment. 

It meant, most importantly, the love that came with a carefully crafted piece of trash hanging on their tree and the soreness of all of them when they woke up in the same position hours later to the tune of the light-up Christmas bells hanging on the tree. 


	25. Tucking Them In

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> My life makes me think of Bechloe sometimes. I was babysitting one of my favs tonight, she is really energetic and restless at night, she can spend hours playing in her room after I put her to bed, and tonight we were just playing with our hands while listening to a song, like lying there putting our fingers together and making our hands dance and I thought, Beca and Chloe would be singing to their child and Beca would do this to calm her down before bed. This is your prompt. — sent by scrawniest-calamity

She had Chloe’s energy. Not just in the way that she would smile, wide and bright light everything and anything was possible, but in the way that she _lived_ like she was buzzing. 

Sure, she had Beca’s eye-rolling ability - the same storm of navy blue despite Chloe’s red hair, put together with crossed arms that, had they not been steeped in some untapped potential for _serious_ future angst, would be adorable on someone so small - but at the core of it, as their daughter got older and more like the Beca that Chloe first met, there was still an underlying hype under her skin. She never could sit still. 

This had always bedtime hard. From the moment that they brought her home from the hospital, she was making them sit on the edge of her bed, gurgles turning into giggles turning into gaggles of nonsensical stories until - eventually, and sometimes not even then, she would drift off into sleep hours past her bedtime. They’d acquired a sort of bedtime routine to make things easier and rules that Beca was never very good at maintaining - things like no sugar past eight, no television an hour before bed, etc. - and for a while it was almost like a game. 

How many times could Beca and Chloe up and leave the room to get anything from a glass of water to a change of freshly washed pj’s before they put their foot down and told the little girl she had to sleep? Night after night she was able to top herself. Chloe, one night, crawled into her own bed after putting her daughter to sleep, sighing. 

“It’s your fault, you know,” she said. “She gets all this manipulation from you.” 

Beca scoffed, a hand on her chest in mock shock. “I resent that assumption. Coming from the girl who smiles and gets anything she wants….”

Aubrey had told them she had the same issue with her twins - only to a much lesser extent, _of course -_ and that the best bet was to shut the door and let them tire themselves out. They’d be cranky the next morning, but it would only make them sleep earlier the next night. 

So they tried that, but the little girl got a nightmare, or whatever one calls a nightmare that happens while you’re still awake, and Beca couldn’t handle the way she held Beca’s face in her small hands, checking to make sure her mom hadn’t been burned by the fire she’d imagined before falling asleep. 

Cynth said she’d been through “that stage” with her kids, though that was frequently the result of whatever foster home process they were trying to make sense of in their mini-minds, and being that “the wife” was a therapist, it wasn’t much of a challenge to work through what exactly was happening there. 

Amy and Bumper’s kid, naturally, slept like a log or, as Amy put it, “like a crisp little Cheeto”, whatever the hell that meant. 

And by the time they reached talked to Amy about their parenting styles, they decided it was time to stop outsourcing and come up with their own solution. So their kid ran on a different circadian rhythm. So what? Between Chloe’s ungodly morning hours and Beca’s nocturnal nights, it could only be expected. 

The process, then, was developed gradually, step by step being added or taken away depending on the success of the act the night before. What they found was surprisingly simple for all the stress that they had been putting into it. 

“Ready to tackle the monster?” Chloe would ask, looking up from her pile of papers to meet Beca’s eye across the counter. The little girl, stationed on the floor in her pajamas coloring some sort of tune that she was mindlessly singing, knew enough what that meant, and it usually took a piggy back on Beca’s part and a small tickle fight on Chloe’s to get teeth brushed and hair combed before walking into the bedroom. 

They stuck the glow-in-the-dark constellations up no more than eight months ago, perfectly placed according to astronomy, because Beca had a knack for the stuff hanging out in the sky, and Chloe liked to hear her tell their daughter about the worlds that existed beyond theirs. Lying on their backs, they’d watch the fake stars fake twinkle, until Chloe’s eyes drifted close and whatever song was resting on the edges of her consciousness started to drift out of her lips. 

Beca would join in. She always joined in. After the first line or before the very last, there would be a humming of a second voice, and Chloe would always smile because what was, in her opinion, too high to be substantiated always found it’s grounding in Beca’s harmony. 

And Beca would sit, watching her wife and her daughter on their backs with tired smiles lining their faces, forever grateful that she had the chance to see what the loves of her life looked like without one worrying thought entering the gates of their mind. She started mindlessly playing with her daughter’s hand early on in the routine, bouncing palm against palm or trickling over fingers, examining the pads and the twists and turns of prints there. Some days, she would notice just how big those hands seemed to be getting, like they grew more and more every day. And some days, she would marvel at how small they were - how hands like that could hold her entire self, molding her life to some different path she didn’t even know existed. 

When the song ended, the little girl would sit still. Impossibly so, and the first time it happened, Beca thought there was something wrong. But if she listened closely, there was still that hum. That constant string of energy. Only this one was muted, slower, smoother, like a boat on tired waves, and it was then that she would squeeze her daughter’s hand to the beat of a heart. Chloe would open her eyes, lift herself up just enough to inspect the little girl sitting between them, and then smile at Beca. 

Without saying a word, they would slip out of the room, but not before pressing a kiss to either side of her temple to “keep the bad dreams away”. 

They by no means had this parenting thing figured out. Day after day was spent fumbling around like fools just _hoping_ they were doing _something_ right. But the kind of satisfaction that coursed through them every night when they managed to slow their daughter’s breathing to a calm, steady pattern made Beca feel like she was capable of taking care of something more than her meager self. 

“I’m glad she’s like you,” Chloe said one night, pulling and tugging at the conversation they’d had months ago so that when Beca grinned, the redhead knew exactly why. 

“The _world_ is glad she’s like you,” Beca countered, shaking her head. Chloe chuckled, clearly disagreeing but not wanting to say anything more on the topic, instead lowering her head to the pile of laundry that sat on their bed. 

Tomorrow would be another day, with another play date and another story and another outfit that was - if Beca picked it out - horribly coordinated. But tonight was a good night in a long list of good nights, and both Beca and Chloe thought that _that_ was, quite possibly, the best way to go to sleep. Not with a fear of what was to come, but a satisfaction of what already came. 


	26. The One with the Hypocritical Mothers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> inspired by that last fic - Bechloe's daughter goes off to college and starts dating a guy 4 years older than her, her moms freak and she points out their hypocrisy. — sent by anonymous

“He’s _what_?” 

Beca had been toddling around in the background of the Skype call for around forty minutes, only really chiming in when it was required of her ( “Sounds like a tough professor”, “The first few weeks are always weird”, “We miss you too, kid”), and, for all of their own safeties, it was expected that she tune out around the time Chloe said, “And…any boys….?” 

A statement that was, naturally, followed by Chloe’s typical asterisk of “Or whatever you might find yourself drawn towards”.

Beca, though, was never really fully able to turn off her ears when her daughter started talking about her love life. She _wished_ she could, believe me, because Chloe wasn’t exactly a mom who kept things private and repressed and _normal_. No, she quite liked to know every detail of their daughter’s love life, citing it as “proof of a healthy and communicative mother-daughter relationship”. So when she heard her daughter roll her eyes (yes, _heard,_ because if there’s one thing she inherited from Beca it was a _killer_ ability to show disdain), and when Chloe promptly squealed and demanded the details, it wasn’t her fault that she had to be involved. Just like it wasn’t _her_ fault that the shock of hearing his age made her respond so….instinctually. 

“He’s a senior, but he’s young for his class, so it’s not even, like, a thing,” she explained, waving her hand in front of her face. Since being away at school, Piper had added yet another string of bright color to her hair - something Beca couldn’t exactly comment on since “rebellious” was also her go-to style for most of her life - and Chloe was “just happy that she’s not going for another ring of eyeliner too” because “your mother was lucky enough to have found me at all with those racoon eyes”. It was a small change, but just enough to through the moms for a loop. This was just the first of many miniscule changes that they wouldn’t be around to observe twenty four hours a day. It was a bit of reality check, to say the least. 

“It is _too_ a thing,” Beca said. She sat down, scooting her chair next to Chloe to look into the screen. 

“Mom, explain to her, _please_ ,” Piper tried. 

“I don’t know, your ma has a point, Pipes,” Chloe said quietly. “A lot can happen in three years…” 

“The age difference between you two could go to preschool,” Beca said, hands slapping thighs in exasperation. Chloe turned to Beca, her eyebrows furrowed. 

“What did you just say?” 

“It’s what, three, four years?” Beca said, “That’s how old you need to be to go to preschool.” 

Chloe looked down at the keyboard. Beca, confused, chose not to question the reaction, entirely too focused on the topic at hand. 

“Ma, you don’t get it,” Piper said. “I’m in _college_. You were the one telling me to get out more.” 

“Yeah, because the only time you leave your room is to commit a minor felony most nights,” Beca grumbled, shrugging when Chloe shot her a glare. “And getting out doesn’t mean hooking up with a grandpa.” 

“Beca, I don’t thi—”

“Ma, that’s so ridiculously unfair!” Piper cut Chloe off before she could finish her thought, her voice rising in  a tell-tale way that promised a break down or something nearing it. It was the same rise of tone that brought Beca to have to hold her down as a toddler in the middle of the cereal aisle, and it was the same rise of tone that made her run away to Aunt Stacie’s house when she was fifteen (a situation that went swimmingly until she got arrested for underage drinking by throwing a party at Stace’s house when she was away). Chloe winced at it, trying her best to communicate to Beca why it was best to keep quiet and not respond with anything but calmness. 

“How the hell is it unfair, Piper?” Beca shot back. Chloe groaned, pinching the bridge of her nose. 

“Beca, seriously–”

“Because mom is _literally_ four and a _half_ years older than you,” Piper said easily. Her head tilted when she spoke, as if to add punctuation that conveyed just the right about of confidence and certainty that she knew pissed Beca off so much. “And you met in high school.” 

“That’s different,” Beca said quickly, crossing her arms. 

“How?” 

“She’s…” Beca stopped. “I….We were….” 

“I tried to tell you not to go there,” Chloe whispered. Beca glared at her, then looked at the screen. 

“We were _acapella singers_ , Pipes,” Beca said, “If that doesn’t scream celibate to you, what does?” 

“Not you two,” Piper snorted under her breath. 

“What does that mean, acapella singers?” Chloe asked, “I’ll have you know that we were quite s—”

“Chloe!” Beca hissed, “I’m trying to make a point!” 

“Right. Right. Sorry,” Chloe said, holding in her laughter. Beca was tapping her fingers against the end of the table, a sure sign of agitation, and Chloe sighed, feeling the tension between her daughter and her wife rising. Looking at Piper, she smiled slowly. “Do you like him?” 

“I kinda really _really_ do,” Piper said. 

“That doesn’t happen a lot with you,” Chloe said, and Piper sat forward. She was invested in the conversation now, and even Beca could see the light going on in her eyes. It was stunning, as per usual, and uniquely Bealian. Something that Beca loved about both of them. 

“I kinda really _really_ liked your mother, too,” Chloe said, humming slightly. It was enough to melt Beca completely, as if the look in Piper’s eyes didn’t already do the trick. She shook her head when she saw Chloe watching her. 

“I’m not saying it,” Beca grunted. Chloe’s hands were on Beca’s shoulders in no time, squeezing once for comfort. 

“Say it, Becs,” Chloe urged. Closing her eyes, Beca still angled her face towards Piper. 

“I guess we’re just not used to you growing up,” she said weakly, like a line from a script. 

Only, and, as the narrator, I feel that this is important to tell you - it _wasn’t_ from a script. It was genuine and sincere and enough to make Beca exceedingly uncomfortable. 

“Does she have time to tell us about him, Becs?” Chloe asked, her eyes fleeting over to the kitchen clock. Beca checked too, smiling. Chloe’s hand moved into hers, and it was enough to make the conversation itself seem so much…smaller. 

“She’s got all the time in the world.” 


	27. A Very Pregnant Thanksgiving

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ooh thanksgiving prompt time: a very pregnant Beca attempting to navigate thanksgiving with the Beale family. — sent by anonymous

“Oh my, you’re about to pop aren’t you!” 

Beca had jokingly promised Chloe only a week ago that she was going to punch the next person who said that. So when she was welcomed into Chloe’s parents house with nothing short of an _exact_ quote of the phrase that was haunting Beca wherever she went, Chloe put a placating hand on the small of her wife’s back and tried to cover up her laughter.

“Just about,” Beca said through gritted teeth, looking down at the casserole her mom had thrown together to bring to the event. Shoving it in Mrs. Beale’s face, she tried to turn her grimace into a smile. 

“Hoey Chloe!” 

Chloe’s older brother came barreling down the steps then, accompanied by three smaller versions of himself, all wearing matching maroon football jerseys.

“Bri-Bri,” Chloe squealed, dropped her bag, and opened her arms up to catch her brother at the bottom of the steps, nearly getting bowled over by the weight and force of him and his three sons. 

Beca watched, tugging uncomfortably at the sweater that was straining against her stomach. The car-ride had been long and her bladder wasn’t being terribly understanding as of late, but she knew that she had to make her rounds before the Beale women escaped to the kitchen to gossip unless she wanted to be the first topic on their list.

She held her hand uncomfortably out for Chloe’s brother, but he looked at it, laughed in the same way Chloe always did - that kind of full-faced, wrinkly laugh that always had a way of making Beca feel like she wasn’t in on the joke - before pulling Beca into a back-breaking hug. She squeaked at it, patting him awkwardly on the back.

“Okay, okay, don’t suffocate the pregnant woman,” Chloe said, prying her brother’s hands from Beca, who was released promptly with a gasp of air. Before she knew it, there was a tap on her shoulder, and when she spun around, Mr. Beale was standing with open arms. 

“You remember our rule, I presume?” he said, and Beca scratched her head.

“Yep,” Beca nodded, “A family of huggers.”

“That’s right,” he said, pulling her in for her second hug that day. The whole act was always uncomfortable - she thought that by the end of her wedding she’d be used to it, but, then again, having a beach ball shoved up her sweater never really helped the situation. It didn’t make her feel any better that the Beales were a family of models. 

Not, like, literally. But around them all, Beca felt positive that she was a troll. Chloe’s mother had blonde hair that was slowly whisping into white, with the same blue eyes that her daughter had. Her father had Chloe’s complexion - red hair, pale skin - and so did her brother. An anomaly, really, that all the best features of the two of them would come together and both of their kids. Beca could only hope that genetics would be as nice to her.

They lived in the same house that Chloe had lived in her entire life, which meant that the walls, though pristine and newly painted, were covered in baby photos of Chloe and her brothers - many of which being professionally taken. Her mother prided herself on the collection of knick-knacks, apparently a sore spot with Chloe’s father, who never saw the need for such clutter, which meant that Beca was _not_ by _any_ means supposed to draw attention to them.

Which was hard, really, because the amount of inspirational plaques that she’d set out for this holiday was really unbearable. Beca was holding a turkey made out of popsicle sticks when Mrs. Beale came up behind her, hands softly landing on her shoulders and making her jump at least a foot in the air.

“Chlo bear made that, you know,” she said, pointing to the turkey. Beca looked at it once more, noticing now how hastily made it was. Chloe was an artist - she always had been - but she had a tendency to struggle with patience. There was never enough time for someone like Chloe, who had a better image of the final product than she ever had of the actual _process_ which meant that their house was filled with countless half-filled scrapbooks and DIY crafts. She smiled, putting it down carefully. 

That was how she operated, for the most part. Escaping when she could to examine various parts of the house, because there was something about pictures of Chloe when she was little that were impossibly adorable. She had red hair that went down to her hips when she was little, and a cowlick that - if Beca looked close enough - was still around now. When she was small enough to only have wisps, though, her cheeks were round as apples, and the freckles that dotted her nose when it was sunny were ever-present on her cheeks.

“How’re you doing?” Chloe whispered when she escaped between the salad and the main course. Beca looked over, smiling. Chloe’s hands made their way over to Beca’s belly, drumming it lightly. 

“I could use a glass of wine,” Beca said, “Or a bottle.” 

“Nice try,” Chloe answered, weaving her arms through Beca’s. “Two and a half weeks?”

“Two and half weeks,” Beca confirmed, patting her belly one more time. 

“A Christmas present!” Mr. Beale said as they walked in, and Beca shrugged. 

“That’s the plan.” 

And, while dinner wasn’t at the forefront of Beca’s mind - it never was when she was around the Beales. She loved them, she did, but they made her too nervous to eat most days - when the casseroles were passed around, she was always the first person to get the plate after Mr. Beale, and the result was her stacking the plate nearly up to her chin. And enough room for another, too.

Chloe’s nephews sat next to, or around, Beca, and if Chloe were keeping track, her wife had well-earned _several_ bonus points by the end of the meal. She could’ve sworn she took a note out of Bumper’s book when she heard talk of great whites and captain America, but it didn’t much matter because after about thirty minutes of “grown-up talk” Beca scooted to the floor to be level with the boys at the kids’ table. At one point, while telling a story that involved using breadsticks as buck teeth, Chloe asked Beca a question about the name of the baby.

To which the oldest nephew butted in with a suggestion that they name it “Spider Man”.

“That’s…that’s the best suggestion I’ve heard all pregnancy,” Beca said, shrugging over to the little boy. “Chlo, you down?” 

“Considering it’s a _girl_ , and you’ve got redhead genes in you too, I’m thinking Mary Jane would work better,” Chloe argued, but Beca leaned back on her hands, cross-legged on the floor, and sighed. 

“Always the traditionalist,” she said, shaking her head. Chloe reached over the empty chair that Beca had left, patting her wife on the head. 

That’s what it was, for the most part: occasional side comments, escapes when necessary, and allowing her mind to melt into the minds of seven year old boys. It was stressful, but not more than usual until the clean-up started. Because the thing about the Beale family was that somehow, over the course of their dinner, the house would shrink and the people would grow, so that the space between the wall and the table was…well…not easy to navigate.

In fact, the entire house had become smaller, somehow, which meant that Beca, in trying to bring the dishes from the table to kitchen, got stuck several times.

“Hey, Becs?” Chloe said from the sink when Beca was on her way back to the table for a second trip. Beca spun around, hands landing on her stomach. 

“You’ve got something…” she said, walking away from the sink towards her wife. She took her thumb, running it right over the tip of her stomach, right where Beca’s belly button had ended up. When she lifted her hand, a dollop of mashed potatoes was left. “Bringing home leftovers?” 

“Shit,” Beca said, trying to glance down at her stomach, but not being able to see past the top of it. “That’s…”

“Adorable,” Chloe answered, eating the mashed potatoes with a smile. “Please,” she said, “Sit. Relax. _Pee_ finally.” 

“How did you know I had to—”

“Because it’s been more than fifteen minutes since your last trip,” Chloe said easily, running her hand up and down Beca’s arm. 

“Tiny girl, tiny bladder, giant baby,” Beca said, and Chloe laughed, having heard it before. 

“Don’t call my baby giant,” she said, slapping Beca lightly on the shoulder. Chloe’s brother walked in, then, pulling Chloe into a head-lock that nearly knocked Beca’s balance over completely. 

“Don’t hit my sister in law,” he said, threatened to give her a noogie, “She’s the mother of my niece.” 

“Yeah,” Chloe grunted, elbowing him in the gut, “So am I.” 

“You got me there,” the boy said, holding his arms out in feigned innocence. “That one….That one’s going to be fun to explain to Aunt Sam when she comes by for pie later, huh?” 

“What?” Beca spun around, facing Chloe with panicked eyes. “You didn’t tell me someone was coming for dessert!” 

“Beca,” Chloe said placatingly, “Chill.” 

“Yeah, you’re already a knocked up lesbian wife, so it’s not like you can _say_ anything that’ll make her not like you _more_.” 

“ _Thanks,”_ Beca shot at Brian, eyes firing a bitter glare. Brian, though, just laughed, and Beca found herself laughing too, because the Beale laugh was as contagious as it was magical, and because Chloe had wrapped her arm around Beca’s shoulder. Mostly, though, because the room was starting to smell like cinnamon, and the sound of the nephews playing in the living room was _deafening_ and Beca couldn’t shake the idea that _this_ was what family felt like. 

Despite the struggles she’d heard Chloe talk about, and the harsh moments between wine sips from tonight passing through their parents, there was a full house with full people, and Beca never quite had that. Troubled and broken under the surface, sure, it still felt good. Or, at least, on the mend. Exactly the place Beca wanted to take her daughter next year when the holiday rolled around.

Okay, so maybe she was hormonal.

Overly emotional.

And painfully sentimental.

But Chloe squeezed her shoulder once, telling Beca to go to the living room to watch the game, because she’d be there soon. And it felt right. It felt like home.


	28. The One with the Birthing Video

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bechloe prompt where Beca is pregnant and somehow Chloe convinces her to watch a video of a real human birth and Beca proceeds to cry hysterically. Chloe, being the sweetheart she is, tries desperately to calm Beca down but the hormones have made her virtually inconsolable. Bonus points if Chloe somehow has to involve a third Bella. — sent by anonymous

Beca wasn’t the most comfortable with the idea of childbirth. 

Sure, she was in the middle of fostering a fetus within her womb, soon to be pushing it out of her nether region, but the less she had to think about that general scene, the better off both she _and_ her wife were. 

It had been the only real reason she hesitated with the whole pregnancy game after Chloe had gone through what Beca called, very non-jokingly, the Dark Year. And, overall, a few hours of utter pain and being torn down the middle seemed worth it for what Chloe had to endure in the months leading up to the due date that never came. So she pitched any ideas her overactive amygdala had regarding the situation, strolled into the clinic, and got herself properly knocked up - as one does. 

For the most part since the moment that pee stick turned pink, she employed her masterful repression skills to very pointedly _not_ think about the result of the baby growing inside her, focusing instead on Chloe’s reaction when she found out and the way there were tear stains on her t-shirt right where she imagined her baby was sleeping, or the tough and surprisingly political question of what - and how - to paint the baby’s nursery, or the  _ridiculous_ size of baby socks because _okay_ if the thing came out to be that tiny and that adorable, she might not mind all the pain and blood and gore that accompanied its welcome party to the world. 

Only, Chloe was more than a little obsessed with the concept of preparation, reading every book imaginable and leaving it purposefully on the coffee table on the off-chance that Beca might pick one up and learn a thing or two. She baby-proofed the house after Beca’s _three-month_ check-up and had the nursery set up before Beca was even showing. She was excited, sure, but based on the amount of “Mommy and Me” articles she had bookmarked on Beca’s laptop, she was also a little overwrought with panic about the moment when, well, the time came for things to actually get started. 

Of course, the two vastly different approaches to the whole thing weren’t exactly ideal for a perfect and nonconfrontational pregnancy. 

This was why, on Beca’s first day off from the office since her ankles had started swelling (her life was so glamorous she was beginning to measure time in whatever strange symptom she was undergoing), Chloe hopped over the couch, plopping down cross-legged beside Beca with a remote in her hand. 

“What?” Beca said, eying Chloe suspiciously. The redhead was grinning widely, though there was a trepidation there that was more than a little worrisome. On instinct, Beca’s hands found her stomach, which was just beginning to round out, and she ran them over the bump there. Whether this was some sort of protective action or a comforting one, Beca wasn’t able to say. 

“I have something for us to watch,” Chloe said, biting her lip. 

“Babe, if this is a porno, I r–Ow!” Quickly, and a bit over dramatic, Beca grabbed her shoulder where Chloe had slapped her lightly with the remote. “Don’t you know you’re never supposed to hit a pregnant woman?” 

“Last night, you said you can’t ever let a pregnant woman lose Jenga, Becs,” Chloe drawled, “I don’t exactly believe the proverbs you speak in anymore.” 

“Whatever.” Beca rolled her eyes. Carefully, she scooted down on the couch, reaching her legs out so they _just_ barely reached the coffee table. “What’re we watching?” 

It was, in every sense of the word, an absolutely terrible idea. 

That was one of the first things Beca said the morning after, when all was said and done, because Chloe was an optimist, sure, and she had crazy ideas, yes, but in what actual world was showing Beca a birthing video going to end in any way that _wasn’t_ conducive to tears. And panic. And more tears. And a request to go to the ER. And _more_ tears. 

(Beca, for the record, would tell the world post-pregnancy that 95% of her reaction was hormonal. The other 5% was then proper and natural state of fear one might be in at the prospect of nearly dying to bring a full-sized tiny human to life). 

And Chloe, to her credit, wasn’t expecting it to be a casual viewing of a romantic comedy. She was expecting maybe a little bit of yelling, bulging eyes, a nervous swallow here or there. 

She just….It was just…

The _tears_. 

“Beca?” 

When she glanced away from the screen, she noticed Beca rolled up into the tightest ball her stomach could manage, face covered by a pillow. The brunette cleared her throat, blinking a few times before standing uneasily. “I need to…Um…I need to go. Do. Something. That isn’t this.” 

“Beca, Bree said that it’s important t–”

“Chlo!” Beca spun around, the tears a little thicker in her eyes, “I have something else to do!” 

She padded off to the bedroom, her waddle a little more pronounced in the last week or two, opening the door after wiping her nose once with the back of her hand. 

Chloe had learned when it was best to leave Beca alone to mope. She had also learned when her presence would be more of a nuisance than a gift. 

But above all, she learned that when Beca _cried_ \- not yelled, not screamed, not got red in the face, but _cried_  - there was something more than just nervousness or anger present. 

There was, usually and without fault, fear. 

“Beca,” she said, opening the door carefully to find Beca face first into the bed. She wasn’t sure - the pillows muffled it - but she thought she could hear Beca wailing. 

 _Wailing_. 

“Beca, babes, it’s okay,” she tiptoed to Beca’s side of the bed, slipping up on it and running a hand down the other girl’s spine. “You’re gonna be okay. It’s not going to be like that.” 

After a few more heaves of breath, Beca’s head turned slowly so that it was up, off the pillow, and facing Chloe. 

Her makeup - the bits still leftover from the night before - had smeared with her tears, and her face was red and splotchy. Her bottom lip quivered when she tried to inhale. Chloe reached out, plucking the strand of hair that was matted to Beca’s cheek via salt water. 

“That’s going to be _me_ , Chloe,” Beca said with a wobbly voice, her words bubbling up into another cry. This one crumpled her entire face, and Chloe, on instinct, lurched forward, looking for _somewhere_ to put her hands. She settled on the other girl’s shoulder. 

“It’s not,” Chloe said. Her voice was impossibly soft and entirely too sweet, and Beca thought she heard a touch of betrayal in it. 

“Yes it _is_ ,” Beca cried, her head falling back into the pillow. “I’m’E’r’habin’Ths’Baby.” 

“Beca,” Chloe chastised, “It’s not exactly a choice anymore.” 

The redhead had always been exceptional at consoling people. But it should be said that this was _not_ the right thing to say. Beca broke into more sobs, her whole body shaking, and each time Chloe opened her mouth to talk more, she wailed. After thirty minutes of running a hand up and down Beca’s back as she hiccuped her way through another series of tears, Chloe reached her pocket for her phone. 

And in forty-five minutes, there was a ring at the doorbell. 

“W-w-who is th-th-that?” Beca hiccuped, head raised from the pillow case once more. 

“Shhh,” Chloe said, because it was all she _had_ been saying, before she turned towards the bedroom door and shouted, “We’re in here! Come in!” 

Aubrey stood at the side of the door in a few seconds, hands on her own stomach, though she hadn’t exactly started to show yet. “Panic?” she asked, and Chloe stood up from her station, nodding. “A natural response to a realization repressed by the more central areas of the mind,” she paused to put her purse in Chloe’s hand, leaning down toward Beca. As she reached out to touch the girl’s shoulder, Beca twitched, scaring Aubrey’s hand back a few inches. 

“I don’t need you here,” Beca grumbled into the pillow. Chloe shot Aubrey an apologetic look. 

“Listen, Mitchell,” Aubrey said, clearing her voice past the softness she had become more accustomed to using. “You sit up.” 

There was a few moments of silence where Beca hesitated before groaning and sitting herself up by her arms. “Now, you’re going to listen to me,” Aubrey said, waving a finger in her direction. “You’re stubborn as fuck, do whatever you want, and singlehandedly tried to take me down. So, childbirth? A walk in the park for you weirdo. Clear?”

Beca wiped at the corners of her eyes. When she glanced at Chloe, she looked almost angry - which was good. Better than sad, at least. With a sigh, she met Aubrey’s eyes. “Crystal.” 

“Good,” Bree said, clapping her hands once. “So, dinner?” 

And that, as they say, was that. At least, until Aubrey walked out of the room for just long enough for Beca to whisper to Chloe. 

“Still not over it,” she said, wincing. After a few beats of silence, she tried again. “And I need to know that if I poop or pee on that fucking hospital bed, you’ll still love me.” 

Chloe laughed, linking her arms with Beca easily. “I called Aubrey in a time of your trouble and you’re _still here. S_ o your range for forgiveness is pretty freakin’ large, m’lady. Pretty freakin’ large.”


	29. The New Years Eve Baby

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> NYE prompt (if you have time): Beca goes into labor sometime during New Year's Eve. Their baby is born on January 1st, sometime right after midnight and is the first baby of the New Year! (Extra point for a midnight kiss during baby craziness) — sent by loud-and-fearless

“Chloe, I’m going to need you to take this the fuck off of me,” Beca growled, her jaw set and her cheeks burning red. 

They were stationed at the hospital, Beca’s hands pressing down protectively on her stomach, and between winces she let out yet another threat. 

And while most of her threats over the course of the night had something to do with the fact that she was carrying Chloe’s _child_ and nearly about to push it out of her _very private_ place, this particular one was geared towards the New Year’s crown that Chloe had jokingly placed on Beca’s head about eight and half minutes before her water broke, from behind her spot on the couch where she’d been put on bedrest for the better half of three weeks. 

Chloe, despite her hand tingling under the pressure of Beca’s strength, giggled. “It’s festive,” she said. Which, really, was probably her first mistake, because one of the most basic rules of existence was that you don’t argue with a pregnant woman whilst she’s giving birth to a child. 

“It’s _dumb_ ,” Beca muttered. 

In Chloe’s defense, she was about to have a New Year’s baby. 

 _Her_ baby. 

The first of the new year, if no one got in the way (she had her eyes set on the person in labor across the hall who, to Beca’s credit, was being _much_ louder than her). 

And Chloe, who was herself born on Christmas (yes. _Christmas_. Because of _course_ she’d be born on Christmas), wanted nothing more than to start the new year as a _mother._ Hopefully, at this rate, one who still had a wife after all things were said and done. 

It was just…too cute to take off. Beca, sweating, nearly white and all shades of pink, donning a New Year’s crown. She looked utterly ridiculous, and utterly beautiful, and utterly _Chloe’s_ and there was _nothing_ Chloe wanted to do to change that. 

Which is why it was lucky that the minute she reached to take the crown off, the doctor came in, with Stacie trolling behind him nervously - asking a series of medical questions that Chloe, for the life of her, couldn’t understand, and not once stopping to say hi to the parents of her goddaughter. 

Beca groaned, winced, and held tighter onto her stomach and Chloe’s hand lingered mindlessly over the crown, not yet plucking it off, and the doctor looked up with a tut of his lips to say, “Now’s the time.” 

“Now?” 

“Now?” 

Chloe was an echo of Beca, sure, but only by a few seconds, and she had the power of thought to glance somewhat aimlessly at her phone to read the time. She glanced back at Beca, forgetting the crown altogether, and took a deep breath, jaw set determinedly. 

“Now.” 

The birth process was - in Chloe’s eyes - the easiest part of the nine months she spent in absolute worry that Beca was going to trip on some _anything_ and kill both herself and the little baby girl inside of her. Sure, she’d have bruises from the pressure applied from Beca to her arm but, all things said and done, she was alive by the end of it. 

And Beca, who had thrown her head against the pillow, hair curling at her forehead and lips white, was alive too. 

From across the hall, around the same time that the baby started crying and Chloe was introduced to the purple and red ball of goo that was her daughter, the sound of nurses’ cheering erupted from the on-call desk. 

It was, for obvious reasons, greatly faded by the sound of her daughter’s pipes which, if genes and first impressions had any say in the matter, were _quite_ impressive. Aubrey would be pleased. 

Chloe looked down at her wife, tugging a few strands of hair that were stuck to Beca’s forehead with sweat. 

She was exhausted. That much was clear. Tired and nearly blacked out, but also grinning wildly, her head bobbing with some song that Chloe wasn’t able to hear. Chloe leaned down, pressing a kiss to the corner of Beca’s mouth and resting her forehead against the other girl’s. 

“Happy New Year, Mamma B,” she whispered, flicking the New Years crown once. Beca closed her eyes, eyebrows furrowed, and smacked the crown off lazily, barely pushing it back enough that it wasn’t standing perkily on her head. 

“Happy New Year, Mamma C,” Beca said back, voice groggy and raspy. 

Chloe leaned in, close enough that only Beca could hear, and ran her thumb over the other girl’s temple. “This one,” she said, like it was a secret, “Is going to be the best one yet.”


	30. Beca in a Crowd

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pregnant Beca has me feeling stuff man. I just like how it makes her character more vulnerable. So speaking of that, how about one where Beca is fairly pregnant and goes somewhere with crowds with Chloe. The crowds are knocking Beca's still pretty slight form about quite a bit and Chloe gets all protective and stuff. Pushing people away while keeping a hand on Beca. That would be awesome. — sent by anonymous

Beca’s center of gravity was, on an average day, completely and totally nonexistent. 

But Chloe had watched, over the course of thirty-eight weeks, Beca’s center of gravity go from nonexistent to, somehow, _negatively_ existent? She was certain that natural evolution _should’ve_ helped an accident-prone pregnant women to, on average, be at least a little…safer than they were when they weren’t carrying a tiny, fragile human within them. Beca, though, became a sort of bumper car of a human (not that Chloe would use that term _around_ her wife, considering Beca was currently _not_ very happy that the jeans she wore on the first day of every new album recording were not fitting her at the moment). She tripped over corners of tables nearly every time she left the living room, missed the extra step on the front porch whenever they were going out to dinner, and had a nasty habit of forgetting the extra baggage she was carrying nearly every time she had to slip between two relatively close-together pieces of furniture. 

It was hard to watch, to say the least, because Beca’s clumsiness, enhanced by her slight frame, was always one of Chloe’s favorite forms of comedy outside of making her blush, but _now_ , with her _baby_ inside of the other woman, there were actual stakes beyond her tendency to laugh. 

So Chloe learned to avoid public places more over the course of the thirty-eight weeks that Beca was pregnant, even though she liked the hustle and bustle of downtown and the way the mall looked when it was decorated for Christmas. Because Beca, eight months pregnant in a public place, tended to act not unlike the pinball in a machine, and Chloe _swore_ with every jostle of her small frame there was a small, annoying ding that rang out over the game some giant was playing with their pieces. 

There were things, though, that she couldn’t really avoid. Things like life and places and Target the day after Christmas. 

“Excuse you,” Chloe muttered when they walked in and a cart narrowly missed clipping Beca’s toes. She had a hand on Beca’s lower back, while Beca’s hands were placed protectively on her belly, and she willed herself to walk slower to keep pace with Beca’s current state of waddling. 

“It’s fine, that one was me,” Beca said under her breath, wasn’t paying attention. 

Chloe hummed discontentedly, her hand reaching from the small of Beca’s back to her hip to pull her closer. “Whatever,” she said, “If any of these dummkopfs bump into yo–”

“Dummkopfs isn’t really an insult that’s applicable to anyone but DSM, Chlo,” Beca said, pulling a basket out of the long line of red. “But keep trying.” 

They turned down the first aisle of sales to find a group of teenage boys - clearly dragged by their mom to pay out all the giftcards they’d gotten over the holiday - and Chloe’s grip tightened on Beca, who responded by trying to tug away from Chloe’s protective touch. Sure enough, as the boys tried to leave the aisle - laughing with a lower pitched voice than they naturally maintained, Chloe could tell - they jostled Beca’s slightly, not bothered to squeeze properly between her and the shelves. 

“Hey,” Chloe said, though Beca’s hand was making it’s way to Chloe’s shoulder in an attempt to placate her. “She’s _pregnant_!” 

Her words were lost on the boys, who didn’t even turn back as Chloe shouted, leaving Chloe to just grunt loudly, letting out a sharp breath and gritting her teeth. “Calm,” Beca said, “I can deal.” 

“You’re _pregnant_ ,” Chloe repeated, and Beca backed away from Chloe, mouth open in a fake gasp as she looked down at her belly. 

“Is _that_ what this is? I’ve been wondering!” 

“Shut up,” Chloe slapped Beca lightly as they left the aisle in favor of another one, “You’ve got to be careful.” 

“And I _am,”_ Beca said, “I don’t think a few rude boys are going to—umph.” 

A rushed man had bumped into her as he was trying to get to the ice cream shelves, leaving Beca grasping for the handle of the freezer to catch her fall. “Okay, that was poorly timed.” 

“Beca,” Chloe said through clenched teeth. Beca’s hand found Chloe’s elbow. 

“I’m fine,” she said, “Keep it cool.” 

Chloe, it should be said, never really lived up to her redhead reputation on a frequent basis. There were, Beca learned, moments, though. Small, miniscule moments where she could see the steam coming out of Chloe’s ears, and it was a strange sense of role reversal when she had to hold the other woman back from whatever fight was starting to rattle her brain. 

Being eight months pregnant made the whole “holding back” thing hard, though, and if she had to say one thing about Chloe throughout these months, it was that she had already very much so received her maternal instincts. Every ounce of Chloe’s energy, it seemed, was sponsored and encouraged by a desire to keep both Beca and the baby wrapped up in metaphorical bubble wrap. And, probably, _actual_ bubble wrap if Chloe had her way. 

So after the second run-in, Beca assumed it was going to be a long trip to the store - well, longer than it usually was - and though she was well-prepared to try to keep Chloe chilled, it was becoming increasingly more frustrating to tell her to calm down when she was feeling a few imaginary bruises crop up and the sounds of the crazy department store were getting loud enough for her to start losing her own cool. 

Therefore, by the time they made it to the baby clothes aisle, Beca was speaking purely through grunts and gritted teeth too. “I swear to God,” Chloe muttered when they saw the cart at the end of the aisle and the toddler sitting in it, “If that becomes a problem, I’m not above shouting at a toddler.” 

“Your wear your chivalry like a charm,” Beca breathed out in a sigh, and Chloe pressed her head to Beca’s shoulder, trying her best to calm down her quickly increasing state of stress and frustration. Beca reached up, patting Chloe’s head lightly. “You’ve got this.” 

She, it should be noted, did not “got this”. 

I mean, she would’ve been fine. 

It would’ve been okay. 

They would’ve left without any issues aside from being a little overwhelmed by everything and needing to take a hot shower that would inevitably _blow_ the hot water tank. 

If it weren’t for the old woman that turned the corner at the same time as them, missing Beca very clearly with her cart but somehow managing to bump pretty harshly into her body. Beca let out a squeak when her balance was compromised, reaching for Chloe’s shirt to try to catch herself, and it was in that moment that Beca, close enough to Chloe’s ear to whisper, said, “Go.” 

“Excuse me,” Chloe said immediately, not a moment of pause between Beca’s permission and her action. She reached out, tapping the woman. “Excuse me, but I’m going to need you to apologize.” 

“ _Pardon_ me?” 

And, as I said, she would’ve been fine. 

It would’ve been okay. 

But the author of this story cannot properly express just how much sass was contained in this old woman’s surly voice when she turned around to face Chloe’s quickly reddening face. 

“You ran into my wife,” Chloe said, “Who is pregnant with my child. And I’m going to need you to apologize.” 

“I believe,” the woman said, sniffing, “Your wife ran into me.” 

“What the fuck, dude?” Beca said from behind them, her voice so small in the white-light ringing of Chloe’s head that she barely processed it. 

“I,” Chloe said, stepping forward with a finger pointed to the old woman’s chest. Her hand was still wrapped around Beca’s, who was squeezing it tightly, and when Chloe took another step, it was to be directly in front of her wife as a means of being a wall between herself and the threat that was being posed to them. “Am going,” she said, taking a deep breath. “to need you,” she paused one more time, her face close enough to make out every individual wrinkle. “To apologize.” 

The woman looked at her with squinted eyes, and Beca’s breath caught at the fire that was there. After a second of Chloe’s steam, though, the woman took a breath, stepping back. “Sorry, dear,” she said, and though it held no ounce of actual remorse, it was enough to cause Beca to tug at Chloe’s arm, pulling her back into reality. Chloe turned around, facing Beca, who was biting her lip and looking up with a mix of innocence and mild humiliation. 

“I’m not, like, a damsel in distress,” Beca said, Chloe’s hands finding their way to Beca’s stomach. Somehow, despite the previous occurrences of the day, as they stood in the center aisle facing each other, no one bumped into them. “I don’t want our kid to get the wrong idea here.” 

“Whatever,” Chloe said, “I’m not a hotheaded wife, either.” 

“So we’re both lying through our teeth, then,” Beca said, starting to let out a smile. “Seems like a good start to parenting.” 

“Shut up,” Chloe grunted, pushing Beca lightly on the shoulder. Beca stumbled back a little despite herself, and when she looked back up at Chloe, her eyebrow was raised, lips tucked into each other. 

“Hey,” she said, a finger up and pointing at Chloe, “I’ll have you know I have a crazy wife who might _make_ you apologize if you do that again.” 

“Oh really?” Chloe said, taking the basket from Beca’s hands. “She sounds like a cool chick.”

“A bit protective, if you ask me,” Beca joked, earning another slap from Chloe. “And a touch abusive.” 

“I hate you,” Chloe muttered, shaking her head though it was pressed to Beca’s forehead then. She closed her eyes, taking a long, deep breath to try to quell her temperature. 

“Yeah, but you love me too.” 

“Ugh,” Chloe groaned, “Guilty.” 

“Now, Chlo?” Beca said, letting her voice go soft and unsure. “Could you, like, stop leaning on me? I have literally no abs right now to keep me….like….standing.” 

**Author's Note:**

> Look at my Tumblah (flabbergasties.tumblr.com) FOR MORE FUN TIMES AND COOKIES (note: we don't have cookies)


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